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Making Browsers Honor the DNS SearchDomain?
Craig A. Smith asks: "I've always been able to use simply 'http://www' to get to my company's web site, presumably because my default search domain was 'mycompany.com.' Suddenly my browser started taking me to 'www.www.com' instead. This happened simultaneously in all browsers (tested Mozilla, IE, NS4.7 and NS7.0) an two platforms (RedHat7.2 and Win2k). The odd thing is the command 'nslookup www' (or dig or host) behaves as desired and still resolves to www.mycompany.com so I don't think this is a DNS issue. I've tried various /etc/resolv.conf settings with no luck ('domain mycompany.com' and 'search mycompany.com').
How do I get my browser to apply the default domain before tacking on the www prefix and .com suffix?"
Check whether or not your own hostname has changed. Perhaps an admin changed the dhcp settings on the server.
The technical answer:
:)
It's a lot more likely that something changed in the way your machine is resolving DNS. Go talk to your netadmin.
The real answer:
Nice Ask-Slashdot troll!
Sitting currently before Opera 6.05 on win2k:
Preferences>Network>Server Name Completion>Uncheck 'Try name completion using'
Problem solved, though perhaps not as elegant as getting your current browsers to behave.
troodon.net
When the target server, in this case, http://www.yourcompany.com, is not up, your browser, depending on setting, may start searching for an alternate location.
Add it to your hosts file.../etc/hosts for Linux and your default Windoze directory for that other OS...
Another advantage of using this method is being able to use other abreviations for frequently visited sites...
it works on my machine
You've just got a new web proxy haven't you?
I've noticed that browsers haven't required a http:// preceding the address for a long time, nor a slash on the end. While I do this out of habit, it seems most users aren't even accustomed to putting the protocol name in front of a name or address.
I would suggest looking through your browser's documentation and configuration, as there's probably an option to turn off the offending problem.
Note that one way to be sure, however, is to try and ping the server in question. Even if the server doesn't reply to ping requests, ping should give you some sort of address which you can compare to the one you want, without any user-hostility getting in your way.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Are you using DHCP in Windows? That's the only thing I can think of that would cause all the applications to change at once.
/etc/resolve.conf you should be good to go. You mentioned nslookup works correctly, but does 'telnet www 80' take you to your originial site as well?
Linux side, I believe if you have 'domain' configured properly in
A few other things:
- Consider using keywords instead of relying upon DNS to do magic for you. Create a bookmark w/ your company's website & give it the keyword 'www'. That should fix you up. (Keywords are the most currently underrated feature in the browser. Especially in regards to their ability to do searches.)
- You want to consider the above not only for convience, but also so your companies tracking doesn't get screwed up a little. When you hit the site with just 'www' (instead of 'www.foo.com') you drop your cookies. Most sites use cookies at least to track unique visitors if nothing else, and you're probably causing a minor bit of unintended cookie churn.
- Another poster mentioned how browsers require neither 'http://', nor the trailing slash (e.g. on http://www.slashdot.org/). Defaulting to http probably isn't that bad. Especially inside a web browser. After all, it's highly unlikely the user intended gopher://. There is a difference on the trailing slash & it's better to include. If you try to hit a server w/o the trailing slash, you'll simply get a redirect from the server to the version *with* a slash. On broadband, it's totally trival, but for narrowband users, it is noticable. Something to worth keeping in mind for the URLs your link to.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
nslookup does not use the system resolver library (gethostbyname and friends). As such, nslookup results won't tell you anything about how the system resolver is behaving.
Check what host "ping www" resolves for a better idea of what the system resolver is up to.
- Damien
Perhaps it's about time we got a new icon for these sort of "Ask Slashdot" questions: a Google icon!!!
I've found that if you're using a site on anything but port 80, IE will choke trying to find it unless you prefix the URL with http://.
Here's the way to make pretty much any browser honor your search domain. This works in IE, Moz(win/linux), Opera (win/linux), Netscape:
.. I seem to remember that that works in some of them.
Type as: http://www/
You can also try just typing www/
Also if you disable name completion which I know you can do in Opera (not sure about the others) then just plain www will work.
Enjoy,
~GoRK
Your browser will probably go back to normal if look for and disable any features called "auto search", or "smart [browsing/urls/etc]". As a side note, one of the really annoying things about Netscape on Unix (at least the old 4.x versions), is that they actually read
11*43+456^2
Uh, it has absolutely nothing to do with the browser. This is a feature of the resolver.
E.g. in
And I have an A record for box.private.domain.com on my local DNS server.
This has nothing to do with DNS!
It's a browser feature!
OmniWeb also has it as "Shortcuts" under Preferences.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
How can I stop having these horrible, incapacitating flashbacks?!
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
We don't use dhcp (small company). I'd think it may have to do with 'internet keywords' in smart browsing.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Be an *exact* explanation of the problem.
If they're using squid, they can recompile and tell it to not use the internal resolver...otherwise, it'll ignore searchdomains.
May we never see th
http://www.geocities.com/pratiksolanki/
user_pref("browser.fixup.alternate.enabled", false);
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Here, I can just type "www" and get the local server. Mozilla seems to change that to "http://www/". If I "ping www" I get "Pinging www.companyname.com [blah blah]" but the browser doesn't show "http:/www.companyname.com/". So I don't know how Mozilla or DNS or the resolver or anything is doing this, it just works; if it stopped working, I'd ask what changed.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
This is just one of those IE-isms that Mozilla just copied.
Not exactly. Netscape has had this sort of feature (type in a single-segment name and it'll automatically put 'www' before it and '.com' after it, for example) since I first used Netscape Communicator 2.0 in 1996.