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by stonesweep 1878 days ago
I disagree with your assessment, email is a service and not a server. A service can run on a server, or ephemerally as in this article (which still has servers underneath it, you're just not running them). S3 and SES are services running on servers.
2 comments

> email is a service and not a server.

Those aren't mutually exclusive, which is my whole point. One definition of "server" is "a service in a network". Another definition is "a computer in a network". So you can have a server running on a server without contradiction. If the user isn't responsible for managing the underlying computer, then you have a serverless server.

> which still has servers underneath it, you're just not running them

Of course, "serverless" means you don't have to worry about the underlying servers, not that they don't exist. Perhaps you were only clarifying and not nerd-sniping, but this particular nit is so boring and predictable in every serverless thread.

> One definition of "server" is "a service in a network"

Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

I was not nerd-sniping and could care less about serverless as a term, I'm specifically talking about calling a "service" a "server" in this chat. I feel this is presenting something as accepted definition which does not match my experience in the field.

> Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers. Oxford English Dictionary defines "server" as:

> a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network.

Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1] which isn't authoritative, but indicates that "server" can mean either hardware, VM, or software services.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13118205/483347

> This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers? I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

> Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1]

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything. Useful? Yes, great for finding random solutions to random problems. Authoritative source on terminology used in the industry I work? Nah.

I'm surprised you need a source for this. Literally half of the server software out there refers to itself as "<thing> server".

Apache [1] "The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet". This is not referring to the machine hosting, it's referring to the software that you run to provide a service.

Postfix [2] "mail server"

IIS [3] "Web server"

I could go on...

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/

[2] http://www.postfix.org/

[3] https://www.iis.net/

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers?

I don't think he was being condescending, so there's no need to be offended on behalf of other people.

I think he was suggesting that part of the linguistic confusion comes from how the tech industry has become so global that different words and phrases are exchanged between cultures, but within the tech sphere.

For example, it's not uncommon to hear the phrase "Do the needful" in places like Seattle, even though the phrase originated elsewhere and was imported by tech workers.

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything.

Good call. I'm with you there.

> Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers?

What is condescending? I'm observing that it's a common problem among non-native English speakers. It seems like you're taking offense on behalf of others and unduly so.

> I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

This is a common idiom among English-speaking IT professionals. If you're not familiar, that's fine. Now you know.

> I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything

In a minute of Googling, I found several random sources on the Internet that indicate that the term is overloaded precisely as I described. One of those sources was the Oxford English Dictionary. I think that suffices to demonstrate that this is a common idiom, but I can't force you to be persuaded. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Accept the L.
Nah. +4 for the thread after adding up the down/up votes. I dipped out, the conversation held no further value to continue to me especially after being told "well it's an idiom you just don't understand". No minds will be changed, no positive outcome will happen from continuing.
You are incorrect, see man pages.
This makes no sense (too abstract of a statement), but here let's try this:

    $ man systemd | head -4 | tail -1
       systemd, init - systemd system and service manager
An email daemon (Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, UW-IMAP, Sendmail, etc.) are services running on a server. An "email server" would be a server running a daemon to provide email service in this example.
This makes me think there should be a Linux tool to extract the Nth line of a file. With options to get the N-Mth lines, etc
There are many. Sed is fast. This will give you lines 11 to 500

sed -n '11,500p' < file.txt

Man pages can be tricky as the content can vary distro by distro (how up to date is your copy of man-pages, what changes have happened, etc.) - this technique is pretty portable to extract the synopsis of a man page specifically due to the format it uses (most times I'd use like grep -A3 -B2 foo /some/file, e.g.).
Ugly way to get the first indented line: `man systemd | grep '^ ' | head -1`

Which is the summary

Calling cut with a newline as the field delimiter works:

man systemd | cut -d $'\n' -f 4

Works with multiple lines too:

cut -d $'\n' -f 10-20,50-60

Makes plenty of sense: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/smtp.1.html

"SMTP transaction against an SMTP server"