Re: FoRK Help.

Rodent of Unusual Size (Ken.Coar@Golux.Com)
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 16:32:00 -0400


Tim Byars wrote:
>
> ON another list someone is trying to tell me that
>
> http://www.foo.com
> and
> http://foo.com
> will resolve to different domains

Different domains, or different addresses/Web sites? The latter
is certainly possible, but the former is a meaning noise since
'.' is a delimiter, not part of a domain name itself.

> and I quote:
>
> At 12:42 PM -0700 6/14/99, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
> > This is completely incorrect. There is no guarantee that
> > www.foo.com and foo.com must be equivalent.

The second statement is accurate. Consider the following
snippets from hypothetical DNS zone files:

@ IN SOA Zardoz.CC. (...)
@ IN A 10.0.0.1
WWW IN A 10.0.0.1

In this case, both <http://www.zardoz.cc/> and <http://zardoz.cc/>
will give you the same Web server system (though the actual Web
sites may be different depending upon the server's configuration).
Now:

@ IN SOA Zardoz.CC. (...)
@ IN A 10.0.0.1
WWW IN A 10.0.0.2

In this case, the two requests resolve to two different IP addresses.
What Web server [virtual] host fields each depends upon the
configuration of the system(s) with those addresses. It
might be a single multihomed system with both names identified
in ServerName/ServerAlias directives as applying to the same
virtual host.. or not.

-- 
#ken  P-)}

Ken Coar <http://Web.Golux.Com/coar/> Apache Software Foundation <http://www.apache.org/> "Apache Server for Dummies" <http://Web.Golux.Com/coar/ASFD/>