Today at work, a system administrator came up to all of the developers and told us there was a problem with the servers. But at the time, we were all using them just fine. Apparently, to a sysadmin and a computer scientist or software engineer, "server""server" means something very different. What he was trying to say, very simply, was that the cooling system had to have work done and they were going to shut down the nonessential servers (the dev servers) for a bit to fix it. Then I thought of my problems yesterday where I was arguing that MySQL Server is the server and not the hardware that it is installed upon.
This is the definition that I'm used to. However, to him, a server is the physical box that holds the hardware, the hardware inside it (motherboard, RAM, fans, HDDs), the enclosure, rack, and cooling system. On top of this, the software (database server, web server, application server) is also included. Saying "server""server" to him would imply that there's a problem with anything in that list (and some things that I'm probably missing, too).
When I was looking for a place to ask my question about MySQL Server, I saw "server""server" in the FAQ and was like "hey"hey, I've got a server installation/configuration problem"problem" and found my site to ask it. Even though I'm a competent, well educated, and experienced software engineer, I have very little experience running networks and hardware (although I have helped out sysadmins in the past when they were short handed and needed to get some stuff going). With people coming from StackOverflow and SuperUser through ServerFault and seeing certain words that to them mean something very different, they can get confused like I was and post things on the wrong site. That only leads to headaches, confusion, and (most importantly) no answers.
I'm not a fan of the term "professional capacity""professional capacity". What exactly does that mean? If you are going to keep that phrase, it has to be defined.
I think that "professional capacity""professional capacity" should be reworded to use some kind of phrasing to describe the type of system(s) that you are running. I'm not sure exactly what terms are best, but "commercial"commercial-grade"grade", "enterprise""enterprise", and "corporate""corporate" come to mind as possibilities that I've heard used. The exact term is going to have to be decided by people who know more about how to define a system than I do.
What are "many""many" networked PCs? Right now, I have 4 PCs on my network. I know for a fact that 4 PCs is not many. But is 5 many? 10? 100? I suppose this ties into "professional capacity""professional capacity". Where do you draw the line between a SuperUser home/small-business network and a...whatever you want to call a larger network?
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