Off the wall topic

[gosh]

This is very off topic, but back in the early 1990's when few people knew what the interweb was, i remember some websites used DNS names. For example, rather than typing www.mysite.com in the address bar, you could just type mys, and click GO, and the site came up. I think it was a dns trick. It's been years since ive seen this. Does anyone know what this was? Is it still around? Curious how it was done

[Tripredacus]

AOL used something like this, but I think it just went to something within their network. I also think this still does exist, I read in a document somewhere that said to go to a URL, but it wasn't a domain. I didn't try going there but I bet it would work.

[MrJinje]

They are just looping through each top level domain until it finds a match. I haven't worked in telecom for over 8 years, so I'm a little foggy on the technicals, but back then there were far fewer TLD's and you could get lucky relatively fast. Nowadays with hundreds of TLD's, and billions of DNS request's per hour, it takes a little longer to accomplish.

It still kind of works today, in windows 7 if I type 'microsoft' in firefox, it will take about 10 seconds to find it. versus the half a second it takes if I specify Microsoft.com. This is because my ISP can cache 'Microsoft.com' after the first user searches for it, and remember it for the next user. I am not sure that is the case with non-FQDN's.

Aliases explain how you are able to only provide half the name 'mys' for mysite. Try typing 'microwesoft' in firefox address bar and tell me if it doesn't redirect you to Microsoft.com.

[gosh]

im not talking about typing in microsoft, and getting it resolved to microsoft.com. Long time ago there was a Tori Amos fan site, its address was something like http://blah.com/blah/~blah.html. If you typed in "tori" in the IE address bar, it resolved to that URL. This was back in 1996 or so. Im guessing this was removed from the internet, just curious how it was done since you cant do that in modern dns...

[iamtheky]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182291

im thinking the autoscan feature included .html - and the fansite perhaps ended in tori.html -

in my estimation you can still do the same thing with people who have single (or very few) sites dedicated - "kazmatsui" resolves to his wiki page, search other mlb players and it kicks you out the autosearch results.

Is this different from the behavior you saw in '96?

Edited May 19, 2010 by iamtheky

[MrJinje]

im not talking about typing in microsoft, and getting it resolved to microsoft.com. Long time ago there was a Tori Amos fan site, its address was something like http://blah.com/blah/~blah.html. If you typed in "tori" in the IE address bar, it resolved to that URL. This was back in 1996 or so. Im guessing this was removed from the internet, just curious how it was done since you cant do that in modern dns...

Those companies would need to have set up a DNS Alias in order to do that. The basis for this is outlined in multiple RFC's including RFC-1034 RFC-1035 and RFC-2219. Re-read my final statement from the previous post and you see that 'microwesoft' in my example is exactly the same as 'tori' in your example.

If blah.com creates/owns an alias for the CNAME 'Tori'(more than likely tori.com), when a DNS request is made, it will loop 'tori' through each TLD until it finds the CNAME record 'tori.com' which in turn redirects traffic back to blah.com.

You as an end-user would only need to type 'tori' to be redirected to the blah.com, but make no mistake, DNS is doing all the magic in the background, and yes this still works on the internet today. There are millions of websites using DNS Aliases, another famous one being 'googel' (sic).

I am done, either you will understand this post, or be blinded in rage at my arrogance for using 'microwesoft' in my example again and refuse to learn anything from me. Good luck and happy computing.

Edited May 19, 2010 by MrJinje

[gosh]

lol calm down dude, no one is yelling at you. I used to work for microsoft and im a server 2008 MCITP. I understand how dns works. A DNS alias is simply a redirect. WWW is a dns alias. It redirects to another server. What i am talking about is in IE i just typed "tori", clicked on GO, and it went to blah.com/blah/~blah.html. The website owner didnt own tori.com. I was very impressed at the time how he did it. On his site he mentioned what it was, but i dont recall what he used. And no, i wasnt modifying the registry or anything. Im sure this was some kind of service or something back in the 1990's that no longer exists. Im surprised no one else heard of this before.

[allen2]

I think you are the speaking about wildcards dns. That's the only way i know to do something like that.

[iamtheky]

Gosh please explain how what you describe is different than:

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typing "roaring-book-press" into the address bar

and sending to the page http://us.macmillan.com/splash/publishers/roaring-brook-press.html

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or typing "bench press calculator"

sending you to http://www.muscleandstrength.com/tools/bench-press-calculator.html

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or how "dont press f1"

opens http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9164038/Microsoft_Don_t_press_F1_key_in_Windows_XP

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or typing in "enus" and having it open

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=enus

maybe not so much but still...

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Am I getting close, because you really are not describing anything different than what I am showing.

Edited May 19, 2010 by iamtheky