Shared resource in the context of OS-level virtualization

A home server is a computing server located in a private computing residence providing services to other devices inside or outside the household through a home network or the Internet. Such services may include file and printer serving, media center serving, home automation control, web serving (on the network or Internet), web caching, file sharing and synchronization, video surveillance and digital video recorder, calendar and contact sharing and synchronization, account authentication, and backup services.

Because of the relatively low number of computers on a typical home network, a home server commonly does not require significant computing power. Home servers can be implemented do-it-yourself style with a re-purposed, older computer, or a plug computer; pre-configured commercial home server appliances are also available. An uninterruptible power supply is sometimes used in case of power outages that can possibly corrupt data.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the request for proposal to build the network. He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran. In 1969, ARPA awarded the contract to build the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) for the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). The design was led by Bob Kahn who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology.

In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by workstations within a computer network. The term server highlights the role of the machine in the traditional client–server scheme, where the clients are the workstations using the storage. A file server does not normally perform computational tasks or run programs on behalf of its client workstations (in other words, it is different from e.g. an application server, which is another type of server).

File servers are commonly found in schools and offices, where users use a local area network to connect their client computers.

This article lists communication protocols that are designed for file transfer over a telecommunications network.

Protocols for shared file systems—such as 9P and the Network File System—are beyond the scope of this article, as are file synchronization protocols.

In computer science, resource contention is a conflict over access to a shared resource such as random access memory, disk storage, cache memory, internal buses or external network devices. A resource experiencing ongoing contention can be described as oversubscribed.

Resolving resource contention problems is one of the basic functions of operating systems. Various low-level mechanisms can be used to aid this, including locks, semaphores, mutexes and queues. The other techniques that can be applied by the operating systems include intelligent scheduling, application mapping decisions, and page coloring.