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Example.com Has Changed

Posted by timothy on from the foo-baz-is-now-frum-burz dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The familiar example.com domain, reserved for private testing, has been updated. Visiting the domain in a web browser no longer displays any content; instead, visitors are redirected to an explanatory page on IANA's website at iana.org/domains/example/. Other example domains such as example.net are also affected. Is this a bad change? Will the redirect cause problems for anybody?"

7 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. No by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Informative

    GET / HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.example.com

    HTTP/1.0 302 Found
    Location: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/
    Server: BigIP
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    Content-Length: 0

    If that breaks your program, you're doing it wrong.

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
    1. Re:No by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It won't break your program, but it might break your example. I've seen HTTP tutorials that show using telnet to connect to example.com, and getting a response. Now the response is different, so anyone who tries the example will see a redirect instead of a content reply.

      It's not a serious problem, but it may cause a small amount of confusion for a tiny group of people.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Re:really? by Captain+Spam · · Score: 4, Informative

    It may not matter very much, but it definitely is "news for nerds", in that nerds are the only one who would even notice. They never said it was "news for nerds && stuff that matters".

    --
    Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
  3. Re:really? by BatGnat · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't know, it is pretty Earth shattering news.

    I don't think i will be able to sleep at work today because of it....

  4. Re:really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes it is. I'm a nerd and never knew that example.com etc.. were reserved by iana, I thought it was interesting.
    Furthermore unlike MOST slashdot summaries, it wasn't ridiculously sensationalistic and misleading.

  5. Re:For documentation purposes by Dynedain · · Score: 4, Informative

    Example.com at least isn't a change in that scenario because it used to resolve to a specific server. Now that it resolves with a redirect, I don't see much difference at the DNS layer.

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    I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
  6. Re:you might have bigger problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The test suite of Darcs needs a domain that doesn't exist. It used to use example.com for that purpose, which now fails:

    Sat Jan 29 16:18:53 CET 2011 Ganesh Sittampalam

        * switch test to use a URL we can make sure will fail

        Seems like the behaviour of http://example.com/ changed to start serving

        pages at all URLs...

    ".example" is recommended for use in documentation or as examples.
    ".invalid" is intended for use in online construction of domain names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a glance are invalid.

    Guess they should read the rfc.