[Sub Domain Question] Not administrator / I am hosted

[Michael Kjorling]

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There is absolutely nothing special about the "www" part. Many,
including me, configure their web servers and DNS'es so that it works
equally well with or without it.

Let's take a pretty standard URL and break it down:

	http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/bind-security.html

Protocol: http
Hostname: www.isc.org
	Working our way backwards: org, isc, www
Path: /products/BIND
Filename: bind-security.html

When I go to that page, various DNS servers are asked about authority
and address information for the fully qualified domain name (FQDN)
www.isc.org: first the root servers receive a query (I'd suppose for
'www.isc.org.') and points me at the gTLD servers for org., which in
turn point me to ISC's servers which finally tell me the IP address
for 'www.isc.org.'). There is no magic about the last part of a domain
name. The only real "magic" about it is that it is usually the only
part we receive an actual answer for from the queried DNS servers.

To show my point, here is the DNS data for kjorling.com:

	$ORIGIN kjorling.com.
	$TTL 86400
	@ SOA varg.mcpoolen.se. hostmaster.kjorling.com. (
		2001083000 7200 1800 1209600 900 )
	  NS varg.mcpoolen.se.
	  NS ulv.mcpoolen.se.
	  NS socal.wolf.com.
	  NS ns2.honnett.se.
	  NS ns1.secondary.com.
	  NS ns2.secondary.com.
	  MX 5 varg.mcpoolen.se.
	  MX 10 ulv.mcpoolen.se.
	www CNAME varg.mcpoolen.se.
	michael CNAME varg.mcpoolen.se.
	cgi-bin.michael CNAME varg.mcpoolen.se.
	pelle CNAME varg.mcpoolen.se.

(Yeah, I know about running several services on the same computer and
I am lobbying to get them all separated - mail, DNS, web...)

As you can see, there is nothing magical about the www part. And no,
there is no "CNAME and other data" error in this zone file, and all
RRs work fine.

In general, a program will assume whatever protocol would be standard
in that application unless told otherwise. For example, most web
browsers assume that you mean HTTP if you don't tell them otherwise -
nowadays they are usually smart enough to figure out that if the FQDN
starts out with "ftp", it is most likely an FTP connection you want to
make; but ftp.isc.org could just as well be running an HTTP server.
SUNet, for example, does this and has a web interface to their FTP
archive at http://ftp.sunet.se/. Note the different parts. FTP clients
will generally assume FTP. And so on.


Michael Kjörling


On Sep 6 2001 20:05 -0000, Joy, MISSINGjoyousairTERMINATOR, and...:

> One thing I'm not clear on, as I've probably arlready made evident, is
> the significance of the 'www'. Now I understand that it is a hostname
> but does it have any more significance than that? ( I just now found
> my address returns the same with or without the 'www' ).  I had,
> probably incorrectly, believed that it was addition protocol on top of
> http.

- -- 
Michael Kjörling - michael at kjorling.com - PGP: 8A70E33E
Manager Wolf.COM -- Programmer -- Network Administrator
"We must be the change we wish to see" (Mahatma Gandhi)

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