Sarcasm much?

Is this really true? Because I have wondered quite a few times. Is www.foo.bar just a subdomain like irc.foo.bar or mail.foo.bar? Is the default www.somesite.com basically just convention?

A game site I used to frequent. I always thought that this would scupper new word-of-mouth visitors.

http://ntsc-uk.com/

http://www.ntsc-uk.com/

So let it be the browser's responsibility to try both with and without it. They'll either be the same, or one will be nonexistent or a not-found page; it's not like people put one site at www.x and another at x.

For example:

http://pullmantransit.com/

http://www.pullmantransit.com/

I am unsure if this is intrinsically stupid, but in our university, we have subdomains of the form www.faculty.university.de, mail.faculty.university.de, ssh-gate.faculty.university.de, mayflower.servers.faculty.university.de and so on. At least the ssh-gate is different from the www-server, and it appears the www-server is equal to the mail-server. Stripping the www here would be a world of hurt.

Long story short: the www is not necessarily stupid, especially if you use it to designate a web server from different servers.

You can't have a CNAME record for something that also has another type of record.... I think that includes SOA records or NS records. That may be where the confusion comes from.

There is also confusion regarding how they are resolved.

If an A record is requested, but a CNAME is encountered, the resolver will then look up A record for the resource indicated by the CNAME. If the CNAME is specifically requested, it will return itself as expected.

Couple this with different implementations of mail servers (and other stuff) not strictly following RFCs...... that led to a general consensus among many greying sysadmins now to try to avoid using CNAME records wherever possible, as they were more trouble than they were worth.

AOL Keywords FTW!