4 ms·

Tangent: I'm curious about HP's hostname taxonomy. I.e. What products or content live under www8 vs www2 or www7. http://www8.hp.com/.. http://www8.hp.com/...

by Tempest1981 10y ago

r1k 10y ago
I assume that's just their way of pinning you to a load balancer.
- Tempest1981 10y ago
  Me too, but then try the same URI at www, www2, www3... it's a 404
  - emmelaich 10y ago
    It can still be a load-balancer of sorts, but at a higher layer than layer 7. Let's call it level8 or the 'wetware' layer. But yeah, not much duplicated content unless you consider translations 'duplicates' (which it is, at layer8)
- walshemj 10y ago
  Or there web presence is to use a technical term "$%^T"
jasonmp85 10y ago
This is an anecdotal story from a Daring Fireball reader, but the claim is it was initially to help locate servers? http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate-domains http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate...
- 0x0 10y ago
  That doesn't even make sense. What happens if a server goes down and needs to be replaced? Do you have to wait for someone to remove the old box and insert a new box in the rack? Obviously there needs to be a handoff of the same name because everyone in the world is linking to the "license-plate" URL....
derefr 10y ago
Having seen these at several large corporations, I always figured it was either: 1. a division of labor: each corporate "division"—themselves large enough to have their own subsumed IT departments—gets its own hostname prefix to plan a routing map under. 2. a division in time: creating a new wwwN "prefix" allows them to "throw out" their old route-map and start again for new projects, while still keeping old projects on their existing routes at the old hostname. My guess leans more toward the second option: corporations large enough to maintain extensive intranets have a particularly faithful dedication to the "cool URLs don't change" philosophy, because they don't want to go around fixing thousands of links built into dozens or hundreds of internal apps, emails, calendars, &c. Of course, if you know you're going to do this from the beginning, you can just do what the W3 recommends, and begin each newly-defined route with a prefix for the current year+month (see https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri).
SwellJoe 10y ago
I did some caching/content distribution/load balancing work for HP many years ago (maybe 10 years ago, now). The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space. So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.
- heyNeato 10y ago
  I don't know why I find that explanation so much more reassuring than my assumption that it was simply a really sloppy version control hack, to denote upgraded deployments. Even though there are a bazillion other ways to codify DNS subdomains by region, including some sort of reasonable vernacular for the region, I'm glad it's about locales, regions and perhaps even content delivery or timezones maybe, moreso than version numbers. Every time I get redirected to something like www2.example.com, I've often wondered which obstinate jerk would refuse to move whatever's on www proper, forcing the entire world to suffer eternity in a purgatory named www2. Hopefully, all those times, it just turned out that I was in North America, region #2, and maybe region #1 was Antarctica for some reason.
jjp 10y ago
Based on a google site: search and an eyeball of the first couple of results pages I'd summarise as www2 - partnering, alliances education [1] www3 - investor relations, careers [2] www4 - central european languages [3] www5 - japanese [4] www6 - no results found www7 - open vms [5] www8 - seems to be the primary site for english content [1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww2.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww2.hp.com [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww3.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww3.hp.com [3] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww4.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww4.hp.com [4] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww5.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww5.hp.com [5] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww7.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww7.hp.com [6] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww8.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww8.hp.com

Tangent: I'm curious about HP's hostname taxonomy. I.e. What products or content live under www8 vs www2 or www7. http://www8.hp.com/.. http://www8.hp.com/...

r1k 10y ago

I assume that's just their way of pinning you to a load balancer.

Tempest1981 10y ago
Me too, but then try the same URI at www, www2, www3... it's a 404
- emmelaich 10y ago
  It can still be a load-balancer of sorts, but at a higher layer than layer 7. Let's call it level8 or the 'wetware' layer. But yeah, not much duplicated content unless you consider translations 'duplicates' (which it is, at layer8)
walshemj 10y ago
Or there web presence is to use a technical term "$%^T"

jasonmp85 10y ago

This is an anecdotal story from a Daring Fireball reader, but the claim is it was initially to help locate servers? http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate-domains http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate...

0x0 10y ago
That doesn't even make sense. What happens if a server goes down and needs to be replaced? Do you have to wait for someone to remove the old box and insert a new box in the rack? Obviously there needs to be a handoff of the same name because everyone in the world is linking to the "license-plate" URL....

derefr 10y ago

Having seen these at several large corporations, I always figured it was either: 1. a division of labor: each corporate "division"—themselves large enough to have their own subsumed IT departments—gets its own hostname prefix to plan a routing map under. 2. a division in time: creating a new wwwN "prefix" allows them to "throw out" their old route-map and start again for new projects, while still keeping old projects on their existing routes at the old hostname. My guess leans more toward the second option: corporations large enough to maintain extensive intranets have a particularly faithful dedication to the "cool URLs don't change" philosophy, because they don't want to go around fixing thousands of links built into dozens or hundreds of internal apps, emails, calendars, &c. Of course, if you know you're going to do this from the beginning, you can just do what the W3 recommends, and begin each newly-defined route with a prefix for the current year+month (see https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri).

SwellJoe 10y ago

I did some caching/content distribution/load balancing work for HP many years ago (maybe 10 years ago, now). The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space. So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.

heyNeato 10y ago
I don't know why I find that explanation so much more reassuring than my assumption that it was simply a really sloppy version control hack, to denote upgraded deployments. Even though there are a bazillion other ways to codify DNS subdomains by region, including some sort of reasonable vernacular for the region, I'm glad it's about locales, regions and perhaps even content delivery or timezones maybe, moreso than version numbers. Every time I get redirected to something like www2.example.com, I've often wondered which obstinate jerk would refuse to move whatever's on www proper, forcing the entire world to suffer eternity in a purgatory named www2. Hopefully, all those times, it just turned out that I was in North America, region #2, and maybe region #1 was Antarctica for some reason.

jjp 10y ago

Based on a google site: search and an eyeball of the first couple of results pages I'd summarise as www2 - partnering, alliances education [1] www3 - investor relations, careers [2] www4 - central european languages [3] www5 - japanese [4] www6 - no results found www7 - open vms [5] www8 - seems to be the primary site for english content [1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww2.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww2.hp.com [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww3.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww3.hp.com [3] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww4.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww4.hp.com [4] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww5.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww5.hp.com [5] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww7.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww7.hp.com [6] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww8.hp.com https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww8.hp.com