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0 pointsKronisLV4y ago0 comments

In case the nushell link doesn't work for anyone else, consider prefixing it with www: https://www.nushell.sh/

Admittedly, i have no idea why we even need to do that nowadays, but that seemed to work.

0 comments

It's because the bare TLD isn't setup to accept requests, but the `www` subdomain is (it's DNSed to a different IP):

  $ curl -v --head https://nushell.sh/
  *   Trying 162.255.119.254...
  * TCP_NODELAY set
  * Connection failed
  * connect to 162.255.119.254 port 443 failed: Connection refused

  $ curl -v --head https://www.nushell.sh/
  *   Trying 185.199.108.153...
  * TCP_NODELAY set
  * Connected to www.nushell.sh (185.199.108.153) port 443 (#0)

Most hosts will alias or redirect away the www subdomain, but that's just a convenience. Of course technically foo.com and www.foo.com can have different DNS entries.

macintux4y ago

My first IT gig, 25 (sigh) years ago, I tried to set up <ourdomain> as an alias for www.<ourdomain>. Seemed to work ok, but somehow I noticed that I had broken email delivery through our firewall, so I reverted the change. Couldn't figure out exactly what was going on, and set it aside.

A few months after I left, I sent an email to a friend who still worked there, and it bounced exactly the same way. Called up my friend in a hurry, and sure enough, they had just finished deploying the same change.

KronisLVOP4y ago

Why even have www.<ourdomain>.<tld> in the first place then, if <ourdomain>.<tld> is entirely sufficient on its own?

It does appear that it's mostly done for historical reasons and sometimes you need CNAME records[1], but overall it feels like it probably introduces unnecessarily complexity, because the www. prefix doesn't really seem to be all that useful apart from the mentioned situation with CNAMEs.

That's kind of why i asked the question above - maybe someone can comment on additional use cases or reasons for sticking to the www convention, which aren't covered in the linked page.

When i last asked the question to a company who only had their website available with wwww but didn't without, i got an unsatisfactory and non-specific answer where spam was mentioned. I'm not sure whether there's any truth to that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix

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