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That's good news. I chose no-www because www seemed redundant and have been wondering if it's a problem. Turns out no, unless it's very big, which I don't expec
by Nutmog 11y ago
That's good news. I chose no-www because www seemed redundant and have been wondering if it's a problem. Turns out no, unless it's very big, which I don't expect my site to be (niche market, not a web app). It can even be changed later by redirecting no-www to www.
Is this limitation a problem in the design of the domain name system, or something quite natural and necessary?
- vacri 11y agoRegarding defunctness, there's nothing magical about the 'www' string - it can be anything, as long as it's not the DNS zone apex (~='base domain'). There are limitations on what you can do with the zone apex entry (such as no CNAMEing it), but no limitations on other entries. 'www' is just convention. As to your question, it's a bit of both. I'm not a network admin, though, so I'll let someone a bit more skilled pipe up. I have run into difficulties with migrating 'bare domains' in a small business environment due to these limitations, though. Not insurmountable, but required more work to cover the issues. Of course, when you're 'big', you'll be dealing with these kinds of issues a lot more.
- yrro 11y agoI can't for the life of me figure out why web browsers don't yet do a query for an SRV record named _http._tcp.example.com when the user browses to example.com.
- colanderman 11y agoThere are old open bugs for this against most major browsers. See e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328 For me, this would allow me to have domain names that point to various HTTP/HTTPS based services behind my single outward-facing IPv4 address. As-is, I have to memorize what non-standard ports they're on.
- Sanddancer 11y agoWhy not just use a reverse proxy and virtualhost entries? A straightforward proxy will take care of the hostnames, and SNI will handle https.
- colanderman 11y agoThe servers are located in different parts of the continent, and the only one that is capable of acting as a proxy has metered bandwidth, while one is interactive and another is a media server. I suppose I could set up a system of HTTP redirects but combined with HTTPS I feel that will get hairy quickly. The service-level redirection SRV records provide are really exactly match my needs.
- merbpoll 11y agoThis came up again during http2. The browser vendors just aren't willing to take on the extra latency at the start of the request.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zrm 11y agoWhere is the extra latency? You can do DNS queries for example.com and _http._tcp.example.com concurrently so that you get both answers in the time of one round trip to the DNS server. If there actually is a SRV record and the target isn't locally cached then you would need to do another query, but that is faster than establishing an HTTP session with example.com, getting the 301 redirect and then having to do the query anyway.
- merbpoll 11y agoThey didn't want to wait for multiple queries to finish. If you're interested in a detailed rationale you can take a look through the mailing list archives (though it'll be frustrating reading).
- spc476 11y agoAnd that's because the major DNS servers don't bother with answering more than one question per query. Nothing in the DNS specification limits the number of questions to one. The only down side might be that the response to multiple questions might not fit in the standard UDP DNS packet.
- merbpoll 11y agoDNS servers can't answer more than one question per query because NXDOMAIN is signalled in the message header and so when QDCOUNT is greater than one the response becomes ambiguous.