News Server Operation - Servers

Servers

Users frequently call their service a server. In many cases this is very far from the truth. While each service is different, here is a list of the various types of server roles that a provider will have in each server farm it runs. Roles can be mixed at a given site, for example numbering and transit may be provided by the same system.

Transit server

These are the servers that handle basic article exchange. They exchange traffic with remote servers, supply articles to the numbering servers, and transmit articles posted from the local front end servers.

Numbering server (stamper)

This server inserts the RFC 1036 Xref: header into each article, so that the back and front end servers all present article lists in a uniform manner.

Back end server

This is the data storage system for the front end servers. They usually have multiple RAID disk arrays to hold the data. The provider can increase reliability by using multiple backend servers with redundant data, redundant arrays attached to the same server, or even both.

Front end server

These are the servers that a user would actually connect to. It is not unheard of for a large commercial news service provider to have more than 50 front end servers. These systems usually only store overviews locally, and retrieve article bodies from the back end servers. These systems typically carry the heaviest CPU load in the farm.

Large server farms typically also place load balancers between the front end servers and the network.