Not that important... More curiousity - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Menoman · 04-15-2007, 11:36 PM

Why can I not get to the site if I type

tfproject.org

and only when I type

www.tfproject.org

This seems to be the only site I go to where that is the case. It's bugged the shit out of me for about 6 months now too :P

Jinn · 04-15-2007, 11:49 PM

Not specific to tfproject, but a good guide at howstuffworks.com:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question180.htm

Quote:

A name server translates a name to an IP address. When you type a URL like http://www.howstuffworks.com into your browser, the browser contacts its default name server and asks, "Have you ever heard of www.howstuffworks.com?" If this is the first time the name server has heard of www.howstuffworks.com, it finds the .com name server and asks if it knows of the name server handling howstuffworks.com. If so, your name server connects to the name server for howstuffworks.com and asks it about www.howstuffworks.com. If the HowStuffWorks name server has a listing for the www prefix, it returns the IP address for "www.howstuffworks.com" and your browser connects to that IP address.

If you are thinking about creating a Web site and are looking for a company that can reserve your domain name or host your site, see this Question of the Day for information on the entire process!
The network administrator for the domain "howstuffworks.com" is in charge of mapping the names in the howstuffworks.com domain to specific machines and their IP addresses. In many large companies, there will be different machines (with different IP addresses) handling WWW, FTP, Telnet and other traffic. On smaller sites, the same machine can handle everything.

The network administrator makes a list of names and IP addresses, like this:

* www.howstuffworks.com - 242.128.34.54
* ftp.howstuffworks.com - 242.128.34.73

The administrator can put anything in that list, because the name servers don't care. The administrator could put in scooby.howstuffworks.com, scooby.doo.howstuffworks.com and scooby.dooby.doo.howstuffworks.com, and when someone types in those names the name server will return the IP addresses associated with them.