Re: [PLUG] DNS question

[Douglas Muth <doug.muth@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Julien Mills <julienfmills@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Our company web site is hosted on GoDaddy.
>

No snark intended, but that's a big part of the problem right there.

> When I query my company website on Google it goes to it without the www in
> front.  Is there some way to get Google to return the entire url with the
> www in front?  It looks like most sites return the www.

Yes, you need to configure your webserver so that any HTTP requests
made to domain.com get a 301 redirect pointing the client to the same
page on www.domain.com.  It's fairly straightforward to configure any
webserver to do that, if you have root privileges on the machine in
question.  But being under GoDaddy, you're kinda at their mercy.

> I'm running a caching dns server, bind, on a Slackware machine.
> If I type in our entire web address (with the www in front) I get to our web
> site (on GoDaddy).
> If I type in the web address without the www it does not work.  I'd like it
> to work both ways.
>
> OK, I just tried it and now it works both ways (the www appears magically).
> I'm getting really confused with this, I'm almost sure this didn't work just
> a few minutes ago.  I need some coffee.

It's not you, it's your webbrowser.  I've seen browsers transparently
try "www.domain.com" even when you type in "domain.com".  Whether that
is a useful feature or not is certainly open to debate!

If you want an accurate test, try using curl or similar from the
command line.  Or use dig to query your DNS servers.

-- Doug
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