[ale] OT- sorta - DNS

[Mike Murphy]

Its pretty simple, really. You can either:

1. in dns, point domainname.com and www.domainname.com to the same ip 
address

2. in dns, cname (aka alias) domainname.com to www.domainname.com, or 
vice-versa.

A real world example (cnn.com):

[root at kermit named]# dig www.cnn.com

www.cnn.com.            76      IN      CNAME   cnn.com.
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.20
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.28
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.20
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.52
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.84
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.116
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.4
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.12

(usefully, dig output is formatted like a named zone file).

In you question, you said "simply doing a cname to a webserver doesn't 
work" which makes me wonder: exactly how did you try to do it? Also, 
maybe you were tripped up by what the webserver thought its url was? 
Apache and most other servers have a config param to set the server 
name, where you might want to put "www.smallbiz.com" there. Also, many 
sites will trap the non-www name and set the webserver to 302 it to the 
www site.

As I'm typing this while diligently paying attention to what's going on 
on Gilmore Girls. If so, please feel free to reply to me off list and I 
can help you some more :)

Mike







fgz wrote:
> The boss calleth on me today, with a 'simple request'. This is for a
> small business site: what I want to achieve is to have any end-user
> simply enter a valid domainname into their browser, then have that name
> redirect to a business website, i.e. they'll enter smallbiz.com, and
> they go off to www.smallbiz.com. Obviously many big sites do this: for
> instance, yahoo.com will redirect to www.yahoo.com. An nslookup on
> yahoo.com will give the IP/names of several servers - or maybe cluster
> redirectors, or a bunch of load balancing devices, perhaps? Anyway,
> simply doing a cname to a webserver doesn't work (didn't think it would,
> but I tried anyway. ;) Is there a simple way to do this? Any good
> concise, favored, resources on the web that address this? Our external
> DNS server is an ancient Solaris 2.6 box, with a really nasty old
> version of bind. In-house webservers are iPlanet ws6sp5 on Solaris 9.
> 
> Thanks.
> -fgz
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

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Mike Murphy
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Email: mike at tyderia.net
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