Hi,

Personally I never type the www. prefix when I am entering an address manually.

However, some Webmasters are plain stupid and have not realised that not everyone like entering those first, four, and totally useless (see http://nowww.org/) first letters. So they do not configure their servers properly and end up rejecting visitors that have not entered the www. prefix.

Do you think OpenDNS should attempt to resolve with the www. prefix if the domain lookup fail, and visa versa when it failed with the www. prefix present?

Or is this an undesirable feature?

Iowa State University does this too (iastate.edu) and it's stupid. I have no idea how much of a problem it would be for other apps though.

I'm with you stapler

i would like to see this. but i think it should be user-settable like error protection and phishing protection. also, it should only occur if there is no www.example.com entry or no example.com entry. it should not overrule actual dns entries.

os2mac, it should be http://no-www.org/

In the case that example.com doesn't resolve but www.example.com does, I think the proper interpretation is to return the www. version. In the hierarchy of subdomains under example.com, www. is the equivalent of index.html and should be treated as such.

I only ran into this problem when Newshutch removed the no-www record from their DNS. I wouldn't have a problem except that the #1 Google result displayed on the error page is to newshutch.com, not the still-resolving www.newshutch.com.

Having a setting available for this would be awesome. Of course, we now have to debate what the default setting would be. I suspect turning it on would be best, since it best mimics the behavior of browsers that way.

Richard

Pencoyd, isn't it an option to mimic the 'regular' stuff DNSes do in these cases? I mean, nearly every ISP has a DNS that corrects these basic www/non-www mistakes and I've never heard anyone complaining their other applications were hurt by it.

leftblank, which ISPs do this? I know some browsers do it... don't know of ISPs which do it via DNS.

I have to take exception with people stating that if a site requires the www subdomain, it is somehow stupid. The fact is, the web is only a subsection of the Internet, and a relatively new one (only about the last 20 years, while the Internet is much older).

The purpose of a domain is to help identify all computers within a net. Each of them typically has a different IP address and a different subdomain (e.g., alpha.example.com). The central computer for the domain (e.g. example.com) may not even run a web server at all. It is customary to use the www subdomain (e.g. www.example.com) for a web server.

Most of the web companies use both the www.example.com and example.com for their web server. That is because some USERS were stupid and did not type the www. But not every web site is run by a web company.

Somebody has mentioned Iowa State University as an example. I do not believe that running a web site is the main business of ISU. So, they obviously have a main computer that is dedicated to something more important (to them) than running a web site, and that computer's domain is simply iastate.edu. And they have a separate computer dedicated to their web site, so they assigned it the subdomain of www.iastate.edu. That's how it is supposed to be.

That said, I would certainly NOT want OpenDNS to assume that example.com should really be www.example.com. A name server has no clue why a computer is asking for the IP of a domain. It cannot just assume that the computer is trying to browse a web site. It is perfectly conceivable that I may be trying to reach a non-web server at example.com. It would be quite wrong if OpenDNS returned the IP of www.example.com in that case.

If you want that kind of a lazy-person service, configure your web browser to correct your URL, but definitely not the name server.

"redprince"... that's a good point of view with a lot of "arguments" in it as a solid base for a discussion. Oh, excuse my sarcasm but maybe you should stop insulting. It's really simple and doesn't take much time, just a little will.

YOU will not have any disadvantages if this option would be turned off by default, so "lazy" person can turn it on for oneself. This doesn't mean they turn it on for you, got it?

I agree with redprince. DNS doesn't know if you are requesting a translation so you can use it to browse a url, telnet somewhere, or use FTP. Furthermore, companies might have entirely different websites running on www.example.com and example.com. If OpenDNS were to include an option, and if people were to use it, that could lead to some major problems when they find that they can't actually reach example.com.

If you have problems typing in www (personally, I've been typing it for over a decade now, so it's second nature), then find a browser that does it.

in regards to the www subdomain scenario and the Iowa State University comment the uk is a 'big' problem with this 'www subdomain' misconfig hence why a few days ago i submitted a suggestion www.glos.ac.uk will work but opendns and any browser will bring up 404 error if the www is missed out (even the opendns domain tagging does not show glos.ac.uk as a site as it does not load unless you add www manually making education tagging horrible to guess (but i know .ac.uk and .sch.uk TLDs are education anyways (same with UK Government sites they choose to be problematic and who knows what else) but hopefully tagging does actually work (when approved)

so back to the topic question i wholehartly agree that opendns should have a step to try and connect using www. as a option before it says it can not load a page

consider example.com, example.com has no A record. www.example.com does have an A record. when the browser looks up example.com and browses to the result (our guide page) we currently throw up the guide results. in that case we DO know that the user was looking for a website, not trying to go to an FTP site or send mail with A record fall-back from MX.

in that specific case, we could instead redirect to www.example.com instead of displaying guide search results for example.com. the most likely first search result would be www.example.com, which the user would end up clicking on anyways.

this sort of example.com -> www.example.com fall-back eoulf only occur within the opendns guide code and not with our dns servers at all. this should satisfy the purists who don't want us assuming prefixing example.com with www no matter what, only if they ended up hitting the guide.

this post is considered a discussion post, not an official opinion of OpenDNS.

So... could we have an option for this added guide code? It is the one (of a few) thorn in my side over OpenDNS. It is a visually shocking search page, and the www.example.com address is not obvious enough.

"noodling"... exactly what I don't want. "visually shocking", that's not my quote, but if I may... it's shocking to see ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SEE when you type an error into your browser bar. Redirecting my error traffic to your OpenDNS Guide so you can make a few pennies if I click on an ad? Really, can't you find a better business model? Typo-corrections is OFF!

all we ask for is the option.