Still getting my head around this - Re: Parking other domains.

[Alan J Rosenthal]

"Robert Chalmers" <robert at chalmers.com.au> writes:
>It's actually ok to have
>
>  domain1
>  domain2
>  domain-n
>
>all on xxx.xxx.xxx.200
>with individual zone entries, resource files, secondary entires... etc.
>like I had in the example?

Yes.  It doesn't matter as far as DNS is concerned that they all map to the
same IP address.  It's like having N different telephone lines and each one of
them has an answering machine attached... and you're worrying about whether
or not it's ok that the recorded message on each one is the same.  The fact
that one name server can serve all those N domains, that's a feature of the
name server software (like a switchboard which can connect to N different
incoming phone lines).  The fact that the data for the different domains
is permitted to be the same as each other, that's just natural.

It *does* matter as far as the *web* server is concerned.  Traditionally,
each web server serves one web "site".  But then HTTP 1.1 (which is no longer
remotely new, i.e. it's pretty safe to assume your user's web browser can
do it these days, and I don't say that lightly, I certainly wouldn't say
that about frames for example) added the "host" request-header so that the
web browser could tell the server the hostname involved, which used to be
considered implied by the IP address being connected to but these days people
feel it important to hide the path name and to use the hostname instead, so
the web server needs to know.  E.g. rather than http://www.example.com/this
and http://www.example.com/that, people want http://www.examplethis.com and
http://www.examplethat.com, for no clear reason, so if there's just one web
server, it doesn't get any information out of the path any more and needs
to get it from the Host: value.  This hierarchy-elimination is much like
the use of somethingcom.com and somethingnet.com instead of something.com
and something.net, which is also a strong trend.