not typing in www

[Robert Cates]

Hi,

there seems to be different ways of DNSing your domain name, but I've always 
known it to be that 'site.com' has to be entered as an A record to ever/even 
exist, and 'www' would be entered as an alias (CNAME) to the A record 
'site.com'.  This way the visitor will reach the site simply by giving 
http://site.com , and IF there is an alias 'www' they can give 
http://www.site.com to reach the site, if not, the site won't be found. 
Keep one thing in mind though - probably 99.9% of the Internet users out 
there instinctively give/enter 'www' before the domain name when entering in 
the URL, so if their request comes back not found...

-Robert

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sebastian Castro Avila" <secastro at nic.cl>
To: "scedarst" <dbickel at infranetgroup.com>; 
<comp-protocols-dns-bind at isc.org>
Cc: <secastro at nic.cl>
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: not typing in www


On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 09:51:22 -0400, scedarst <dbickel at infranetgroup.com>
wrote:

> Could anyone tell me what entry i need to put in my dns so my users
> dont have to type www?  They want to type http://site.com instead of
> http://www.site.com
>

In the same way you define an A record for "www", you must define an A
record for "site.com".

Your zone should look like

@ IN SOA ( <soa params> )
   IN NS ns1.site.com.
   IN NS ns2.site.com.
   IN MX <prio> mail.site.com.

and here you add
   IN A <ip.address>

After checking the zone using named-checkzone, reload it (with rndc reload
zonename) and check using dig (dig A site.com @your.server).

Regards
-- 
Sebastian E. Castro Avila             sebastian at nic.cl
Administrador de DNS, NIC Chile
Fono: (2) 9407705                  Fax  : (2) 9407701