From the course: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) v1.1 (200-301) Cert Prep

Endpoints and servers

From the course: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) v1.1 (200-301) Cert Prep

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Endpoints and servers

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(ethereal music) - [Instructor] In this video, we want to define a couple of terms, endpoints and servers. An endpoint, also known as a client, is a device that is going to connect to the network and get resources from the network. That resource might be internet connectivity. That resource might be a file. The resource might be a printer that we have access to over the network. And this is also called a client server architecture. And you can use the term endpoint and client synonymously. And the clients are accessing a repository of resources on a device called a server, and the server is running some sort of a specialized operating system so that it can provide these different resources while giving a very granular level of permissions. And there's a lot of really cool features that we can turn on on a server because a server is designed specifically for that purpose of sharing resources. Maybe it's a database server, maybe it's a file server, maybe it's a print server. But this is called a client server architecture where the clients are accessing some common repository of resources on the network. That's as opposed to a peer-to-peer architecture. In a peer-to-peer architecture, the clients themselves are serving up the resources. A client might share a printer that it's directly attached to. Maybe a client is able to share files on its local hard drive. And maybe that's more convenient than having all of these resources placed on a server. And also we avoid the expense of having to purchase a server and having to purchase a network operating system. A client could say, I've got this set of files available. I'm going to let everybody in the office use this set of files. Or maybe I'm attached to a label printer and I want everybody in the office to be able to share my label printer. Those would be some examples of when we might want to use a peer-to-peer architecture. But please realize that a peer-to-peer architecture is not going to be as robust as a client server architecture that's using some sort of a specialized network operating system. For example, if we're using a Microsoft Windows server, that's going to be much more robust and give us a lot more control than using Microsoft Windows 11 on a client or an endpoint. We're just not going to have the same feature set there, but depending on the application, we might need to do both. Maybe we want to combine some peer-to-peer sharing for some resources along with a file server that might make available other resources. And that's a comparison between a client server architecture where resources are served up by a server and a peer-to-peer architecture where the peers or the clients themselves share resources on the network.

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