Quick question: Is the "www." thing really needed for URL's. My browsers (AOL & IE) seem to work just fine either way.
The only reason I ask, is there seems to be an uptick in the number of people making a point that the www is not needed. As if they registered separate domains.
On a sunny day (Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:45:43 -0700 (PDT)) it happened mpm wrote in :
The www 'can' be defined in the name server config files, so if you owned domain 'something.net' and defined '
And http is the protocol, the browser will default to that, but it could be ftp, https, etc..
PS A name server is a server that is part of a global network that translates the human names we have for sites to an IP number.
So when you type
Hope this helps.
On a sunny day (Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:58:33 GMT) it happened Jan Panteltje wrote in :
Eh, I _did_ define it. so it also works.... must have forgotton about it :-)
But anyways www.xxx and xxx can point to a total different machine:
grml:# host microsoft.com microsoft.com has address 207.46.197.32 microsoft.com has address 207.46.232.182
grml: # host
And yet, typing the IP addresses brings you back to the microsoft site. What a tangled web they weave ;-)
On a sunny day (Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:39:29 -0700) it happened donald wrote in :
Yes, see my other posting, I _did_ add it, but forgot about it it seems.
Yes.
I clicked on both and the same site came up.
So I guess that the name servers have both it its databases.
I have seen sites in the past not respond correctly till I added the www. in front of the name.
go figure
donald
donald wrote in news:qe-dnaNKEORPUxHVnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:
Well, becasue not all sites are resigered as www.sitename.
If you bought (registered)
It's similar in that reard to .com, .net, .org, and other suffixes - if you register a website as
This is most common with "catchy" names, popular words/phrases, and the like.
HTH
OMG, my head is going to explode! Can somebody simplify the above (most, if not all of it)??
microsoft.com and
Are they the same thing, or are they different? Can one always take you to destination-A, and the other always to destination-B? Can they be owned by different entities?
How would a DNS resolve this?
Put a plastic bag over your head. It will contain the explosion and make cleanup somewhat easier.
Different.
If you only specifiy microsoft.com, that's only the domain and can refer to any of Microsoft's servers.
However, many DNS servers are configured to redirect calls to the domain, to a specific server. That's why just microsoft.com works. For example:
C:\\>nslookup Default Server: DD-WRT Address: 192.168.1.1
Server: DD-WRT Address: 192.168.1.1
Non-authoritative answer: Name: microsoft.com Addresses: 207.46.197.32, 207.46.232.182
Server: DD-WRT Address: 192.168.1.1
Non-authoritative answer: Name: lb1.www.ms.akadns.net Addresses: 65.55.21.250, 207.46.19.190, 207.46.19.254, 207.46.192.254 207.46.193.254 Aliases:
Note that the lookup points to the Akamai DNS redirectors.
You picked a rather bad example becuase MS uses a load balancing system, where the DNS (domain name service) redirects lookups of
No. With load balancing and DNS redirection, the decision is not yours. You can select a specific server ONLY by IP address, not name.
No. All sub-domains and server names under microsoft.com are owned by whomever owns microsoft.com. You can delegate ownership and control of subdomains, as is common in the geographic domains, such as .US, but I doubt that Microsoft will tolerate that. For example, my office FQDN server is comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us. The US domain is owned by Network Solutions. The .ca.us domain is also run by them. santa-cruz.ca.us is run by chime.com. I own the sub-domain of comix.santa-cruz.ca.us. The gateway server is non-cleverly named comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us. There's also smtp.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us and
How DNS redirection works:
Note that there are various algorithms to impliment load balancing. In most case, the DNS server will do a reverse DNS lookup on your IP address, determine the approximate geographic location, and assign the "nearest" web server to the DNS lookup for
Note that DNS redirection is NOT required to perform load balancing. It can be done by the router:
How DNS works:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Thanks Jeff. That explains it.
So, in all liklihood, all these guys jumping around claiming they don't need the 'www" (for whatever benefit they see in that? - which to me is none), are just "lucky" that their particular DNS happens to have both URL formats (with and without www) pointing to the same server.
Your explaination also answers another question I had, but did ask: And that was along the lines of subdomains, such as
-mpm
(Example domains changed to example.com)
Not true. You cannot *register*
Here is how it works:
The Root of the domain name system is owned and controlled by ICANN
-- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
.com is a top level domain which ICANN has assigned to a sponsoring organization known as a TLD Registry to administer and control. In the case of .com that would be VeriSign.
Verisign has assigned the right to sell second level domains under .com to hundreds of Domain Name Registrars. The Registrar is where you, the end user, go to register a domain name -- or in some cases you go through additional layers of resellers. When I registered guymacon.com I obtained the rights to
Registrars charge an annual fee for delegating a domain name to a user and (usually) setting up a record in a name server. Although this is often called "selling" the domain name and the registrant is called an "owner," no such legal relationship actually exists. The correct term is "registrant" or (less commonly) "domain holder".
These are configuration choices made at the server level. The server can serve up a webpage at example.com and give an error at
I have been experimenting with redirects; you can see the results at [
This is true, which is why I registered guymacon.com, .net. and .org. I use .org and .net for experimenting and tweaking, and .com as the site I use to communicate with the world.
-- Guy Macon
Make sure to get it on video and put it on YouTube...
Different.
Yes. Or to the same destination.
The concept of "owning" does no apply. See my other post in this thread.
Read these pages, and let me know if you have any questions after reading them.
-- Guy Macon
I believe that this is incorrect, but am open to the possibility that my understanding is incorrect.
Here is my understanding:
A fully qualified domain name is any domain name that unambiguously specifies an exact location in DNS tree. A FQDN can be at any level, but no TLDs that are FQDNs exist. Partially qualified domain names only specify a portion of a domain name, and further interpretation must be done to fully identify the node.
Within DNS master files, FQDNs end with a dot, while PQDNs do not. If the DNS master file lists [ example.com ] and [
-- Guy Macon
I had to dig out my copy of O'Reilly "DNS and BIND"[1] to see if it is possible to setup a DNS record with just microsoft.com. Apparently, you can, but you get to point to exactly one IP address. You can alias the IP to other domain names, but not to other IP's. Not very useful if you have multiple servers using that domain. Therefore, methinks a FQDN should include the server/host/machine name. Wikipedia agrees:
[1] I just discovered I have 4 different editions of DNS and BIND. No wonder there's no more room on the bookshelves.Disclaimer: I are not a DNS expert (despite the pile of books).
Agreed. The corollary is also true. If the name is ambiguous, it's not a FQDN.
Well yes. If there's any possibility of ambiguity, it's not a FQDN. As soon as you only specify only the domain, you run the risk of ambiguity.
Yep. If furthur interpetation is required, it's ambiguous.
Yeah, but defacto practice and convention have it that URL's do NOT end in a dot. If you're using dig, nslookup, DNSlint, or other tools, you need to pay attention to the trailing dot. For generic web surfing, the ending dot is never used.
"In practice, the trailing dot is almost always omitted in everyday applications, making such domain references technically ambiguous."
Incidentally, SNMP OID's have the same problem. They should all start with a dot, but rarely do so.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Well... not exactly. When you register a domain, it's common practice for the registrar to include CNAME or A record for
Yep. It can get messy fast. For example, I own the 11junk.com domain. The sub-domains of
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Guy Macon wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Oh, OK - sorry, ht's how it was explained to me .
I appreciate the correct information :)
I write my own DNS records and have cmplete control of the nameservers for my domain. Any serious web developer will do the same.
-- Guy Macon
Actually, likely as not, the browser adds the "www." itself.
I agree that would make life easier. I just finished a project where I had to connect with a SQL database hosted on 1and1.com Visual Studio can't administer the database directly due to host restrictions. So you have to do a lot of connection strings behind the scenes.
Incidentally, when I mentioned previously that I always try to use complete URL's in code, I guess that's mainly because the stuff I undertake as projects hardly ever gets moved around. I'll set some global variables to store the URL(s), but that variable will be the complete domain and path. For what I do, I just don't see the benefit to local addressing. (But I'm sure there's a reason for it.)
Actually I take that back. Some of the stuff I do in JavaScript will use relative addressing, but that's all client-side stuff, not web per se.
-mpm
The reason usually given is the ability to move pages to different directories or to different servers without changing the URLs. In my opinion, that just means that they don't have a good search and replace that works on multiple files at once.
-- Guy Macon
I thought it was so that you'd only have to change one thing - hard-coding absolute links makes as much sense as hard-coding numerical constants, in my no so humble opinion. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
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