browsing our domain name without the "www" 1

[baronne]

We've just moved our domain name to a new host and moved our web hosting to another company. All is going fine except I have an issue browsing a newly setup sub-domain.
The subdomain on the webhost is actually setup as a subfolder on our main domain, ie.

http://hmsg.co.uk/my

So the subdomain my.hmsg.co.uk points to that location (actually it's an A record pointing to the web host's IP address). PROBLEM IS: I can browse to

http://www.hmsg.co.uk

as well as

http://www.hmsg.co.uk/my

- I can't, however, browse to our site if I omit the www, ie.

http://hmsg.co.uk

- so I can't get to our my.hmsg.co.uk - I know it must be working because I can browse to it outside our network (from home)
There must be something internal on our DNS I need to set so that we can browse to this address? Any ideas?
cheers
baronne

:: baronne
------------------
"lekker, shot bru

 

[baronne]

I worked out what it was. I had a bunch of strange A records on our internal DNS servers, so I cleared those and did a scavenge stale records. Also there was a problem with our proxy server which needed to be told not to ignore the hmsg domain name when a request for hmsg.co.uk came in....
this probably makes no sense to anyone, but hey, I thought I'd tell you all anyway. cheers
baronne

:: baronne
------------------
"lekker, shot bru

 

[GlenJohnson]

Not so fast. What were these strange A records. If you don't know what they were, they may come back to haunt you. Congratulations on solving it, and thanks for letting us know. To many times a problem is solved, and the poster just lets things hang in the balance.

Glen A. Johnson
If you're a kid at heart, check out Tek-Tips Disney
"Education is the best provision for old age."
Aristotles (384 BC-322 BC); Greek philosopher.

 

[theScien]

I also can't setup my domains to be served out without the

http://www subdomain,

I was told it can be done with NTLA or something like that, don't know what it is, and that it is set in the registry?

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Who and what controls the

http://www bit?

I run Win Server 2003 STD, IIS and MS DNS server.

 

[baronne]

hi,

effectively the

http://www is

simply a hostname much in the same way I could setup daffyduck.domain.com to point to a web server and serve up pages. It's just that www. is really what us folks have got used to in front of domain names. Some websites of course don't have a

http://www in

front such as magicseaweed.com (even if you put the

http://www in

front it changes it)
so... for me, firstly I added a public DNS record without a host name so: blank host name A record ip.address.here
Then I had to ensure there were no odd A records lying around on my internal DNS.
Baronne

:: baronne
------------------
"lekker, shot bru

 

[elgrandeperro]

Using "blank" is dangerous, because it takes the context of what preceded.
So if you had:

http://www IN

A 1.2.3.4
IN A 4.5.6.7

This would simply assign

http://www to

the 2 ips.
But if you had, after the SOA:

IN A 4.5.6.7

http://www IN

A 1.2.3.4

then the IP for the domain would be 4.5.6.7 and

http://www would

be 1.2.3.4

The correct way is to use the '@' sign, which signifies the domain that is being defined in the file.

then

http://www IN

A 1.2.3.4
@ IN A 4.5.6.7

And if the lines were reversed give the same result:

http://www is

1.2.3.4 and just the web site for the domainame gives 4.5.6.7.

gene