Lots of places do it - many do not have a foo.com,
or reserve foo.com as a mail relay only. Lots of
other places do it - even a quick check yields the following:
~ ~.com? www.~.com? same?
toyota Y Y no
coke Y Y yes
ford N Y (no)
gm N Y (no)
pepsi N Y (no)
jvc N Y (no)
sony Y Y no
This is a survey of things in my office, or that I can see
out my window. Not positive proof, but sufficient to
refute the claim, I think. :-)
> So the easiest approach is just to map them to
> the same IP so that people can type "http://www.foo.com" or
> "http://foo.com" and both will go to your website.
Nope - easy as far as websites isn't easy as far as FTP, or
other sites. Keeping the addresses separate helps partition
traffic without requiring nasty snooping routers.
> An alternative strategy would be to tell the webserver to redirect requests
> from "foo.com" to "www.foo.com".
That requires running a webserver on foo.com, so it can
respond to connections and do the redirection.
> One last little bit thrown into the picture is that new browsers have a
> feature that will automatically try to resolve "http://www.foo.com" when
> someone types "foo.com" into the URL/Address line. But normally it will
> try to access "http://foo.com" first.
This is likely the primary problem. E.g., for toyota.com,
It did try to access toyota.com first. When that failed, it
tried www.toyota.com.
> So to answer your question, that someone is correct. If you really wanted
> to be a annoying SOB you can define www.foo.com and foo.com to point to
> totally different IP addresses, these could represent two web servers
> running on the same computer or two two different computers. The one catch
> here is that if the computer listed at foo.com is down, your browser might
> try the www.foo.com server as an alternative. This behavior isn't
> specified by any RFC, but some do it anyways.
This is not happening in the DNS; it's outside the scope
of the DNS to retry with prefixes. The DNS does the right
thing - try it....
Joe