With regards to server administration, I am going to make the assumption that you are familiar with the operating system for which you are administering. I won't go into detail about the many aspects of the Windows Control Panel/Administrative Tools or Unix file system structure. There are many great web resources available on these topics.

I believe that Unix is the best operating system for a server environment. With that said, these series of articles will revolve around Linux distibutions that I have covered, primarily Gentoo. However, I will not rule out Windows as a plausible server environment, and, where applicable, I will discuss asides on how the topic at hand can be applied to a Windows environment (user and group administration, for example).

Also, I will make the assumption that the user is familiar with basic hardware and software terminology. My prior article regarding differences between Linux and Windows required a fairly high level of terminology discussion as the target audience is Linux/Windows newbies. However, for the server administration sections, I am aiming for more experienced users who have probably taken a course or two in computer usage/administration/programming and are familiar with the lingo I will use freely. If this is not the case, don't expect a lot of definitions from the proceeding sections. The following section details different server models that a server administrator could deal with in a typical server environment.