At 3/27/02 1:37 PM, Dassa wrote: >It was recently raised to my attention there is a site org.com that is >maintaining DNS records such as www.dhs.org.com and even >www.microsoft.org.com. I haven't had a poke around as yet but suspect >they may have a great many such domain names in their DNS.
Actually, they just have a single wildcard entry for "*.org.com"; they don't have specific names in their database. >One interesting aspect of this is that if your site DNS goes down, their >DNS will then redirect users from your site ie www.dhs.org to their >www.dhs.org.com. This is because you're using a Web browser that tries appending ".com" (and possibly prepending "www.") to a host name if it can't find it, on the assumption that you might have typed something like "aol" instead of "www.aol.com". It's your Web browser that's doing it, not their DNS software. The "org.com" people are just taking advantage of a design flaw in your Web browser. Your browser is guessing at what you meant to type when it can't find any record of "www.dhs.org", and one of its incorrect guesses happens to be "www.dhs.org.com". This is a good reason to make sure your DNS is reliable; if you don't, people might get redirected to something their Web browser thinks is "close" if your DNS doesn't respond. (And it provides one answer to people who occasionally ask "why do I need redundant DNS servers, since if the network serving my primary DNS is down, people won't be able to reach my Web site on the same network anyway?" -- one answer is that if none of your DNS servers are responding, your visitors might be shifted off to somewhere else on a whim but still think they'd actually reached your site.) -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies "The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was."
