Odd behavior when clicking on internal link that is using a non-FQDN

[Kevin Darcy]

What do your clients have as their "suffix search order" and/or 
"connection-specific suffixes"? That's what determines how they resolve 
shortnames.

If they're going through a web proxy, then you'd need to look at that 
web proxy's resolution configuration in the same way.

This is one reason why shortnames are inherently evil. Just think if the 
MacBidouille site was a Trojan Horse site that looked even passingly 
like your internal "mbserv1" site: it could entice your users (at least 
some of them -- the less observant ones) to authenticate to their site 
and steal their passwords, which are likely to be the same passwords 
they use for authenticating elsewhere. That could then be used to 
leverage identity theft, unauthorized system access, etc. Using 
fully-qualified domain names everywhere mitigates these security risks 
as well as making for more efficient name resolution all around. I 
realize I'm a voice in the wilderness here...

- Kevin

Smith, William E. (Bill), Jr. wrote:

>On one of our internal web pages, the following link is present,
>http://mbserv1/pdp.  The server known as mbserv1 was shutdown about 2
>months ago and is no longer present on our network.  Despite this, some
>users have reported that when clicking the link, they are taken to a
>French site.  When I reproduced this problem, I was taken to the
>following page.  
>
>http://forum.macbidouille.com/index.php?showtopic=73116&st=90
>
>What exactly would be causing this?  My only guess is that it's related
>to the hostname not being fully qualified and the browser subsequently
>trying to resolve the request by appending a myriad of other domain
>names before it finally found a match with mbserv1.macbidouille.com,
>which in turn takes you to the MacBidouille home page.  The obvious fix
>would be to fully qualify the domain name or better yet just remove the
>link altogether since it's no longer valid.  That said, I'm curious as
>to what is causing this and even more curious as to why I'm taking
>directly to the forum page when clicking on the internal link but to the
>home page when going to http://mbserv1.macbidouille.com
>
>Bill Smith 
><mailto:bill.smith at jhuapl.edu> 
>ISS Server Systems Group 
>Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory 
>11100 Johns Hopkins Road 
>Laurel, MD 20723 
>Phone:  443-778-5523 
>Web:  http://www.jhuapl.edu    
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