What is a server socket?

Question

I'm having to do a project for class where I come up with replacement servers for a theoretical data center, yet we haven't had any discussion AT ALL about servers. When I'm looking up potential servers they all are identified as two socket or four socket.

A google search for "what is a server socket" comes up with a term for a TCP connection.

My own knowledge of computers recognizes a socket as a location on the motherboard you seat a CPU.

Does this simply indicate how many processors the motherboard holds, or does it indicate the number of connections the server can handle?

Answer 1

The term socket has many meanings. Within TCP/IP, a socket is an IP address with a port number attached that is used for communications between machines through a network.



Each socket is an endpoint for communication, with two overall as each side has an endpoint (since you need at least 2 entities for communication).



A port is a number associated with a specific service in terms of TCP/IP. For example, port number 80 is associated with "http". FTP is associated with another, and Telnet is associated with another and so on and so forth.



As an example, 192.168.1.199:80 might be a connection to eBay Customer Support page. It could be compared to calling up an organization's phone number and dialing an extension to the department you want. It would be the same as dialing 1-800-555-EBAY, extension 1000 (for customer support).

Answer 2

No you are way off.



Internet connections are based on sockets, When you create a TCP or UDP socket you specify a port number. Then if you know what port the server is listening to you can create a connection from the client.



UDP connections aren't really a connection, The server side of a UDP would just listen on a port and the client would broadcast the data w/o any knowledge of if the server received all the data, some of the data, or is even online. TCP connections allow you to see if the client received all the data and is more of a direct connection.

Answer 3

In my pants.



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