Re: FoRK Help.
David Crook (dcrook@commwerks.com)
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 14:43:24 -0700
At 02:15 PM 6/14/99 -0700, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
>
>
>David Crook wrote a bunch of stuff that's true, but irrelevant:
>
>> So to answer your question, that someone is correct.
>The question was, can they resolve to different domains.
>The answer is, they can resolve to different IP addresses or
>they can resolve to forward to different domains, or they
>can even resolve to two different virtual or real machines
>in a domain and forward them off to someplace else as in
>a parked domain. Ping, trace, or route may return different
>information, but whois will always map to the same information.
>
>
>
>> 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.
>I think this is covered under RFC 1035, implementers are free to violate
>any DNS conventions on their own system as long as all standard conventions
>are observed from other hosts.
>
>Just feeling argumentative,
>
Acutally I was referring to the browser "feature" of trying www.foo.com if
"foo.com" wasn't answering as not being RFC defined behavior. I aggree
that sysadmins can setup their domains and webservers anyway that want.
The point I wanted to make, but didn't relate properly is that 90+% of the
time, when someone is making a HTTP request to foo.com when they should
have asked for www.foo.com, the best thing to do is to just send them to
www.foo.com. Since these people are part of that 97% anyways, and any
thing you tell them about using the correct URL is going to go over their
heads, it would be best if they just got to the webserver without knowing
that anything happened. The easiest way to do that is just to resolve them
to the same IP address in the domain record.
But it doesn't have to be setup this way. You can send them to a whole
different computer if you want to. But why would you want to do that? You
are just going to get email from "clueless@aol.com" saything that your
website don't work.
Dave
---
David Crook - davec@commwerks.com
CommWerks - Industrial Strength Internet Solutions