[development] The www-subdomain (WAS: Re: Patching settings.php)

[Morbus Iff]

>> Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well
 >> and they may not be on the same machines.
> 
> You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at
> http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs.  I

I don't think that's his point at all.

"example.com" has no indication of what its usage is for. Your request 
would have to fall back to using ports to determine what service you're 
requesting - 25, 110, and so forth. Or, yes, the ubiquitous 80. For some 
people, that's absolutely fine, and yes, I use that shorthand when I 
type in website addresses, because I expect it to work. But if my svn 
server is on an entirely different machine than "example.com", using 
"example.com" won't get me there unless I do port forwarding on the 
example.com server itself.

 From a server architecture standpoint, I /do/ want www.example.com, 
mail.example.com, svn.example.com, and so forth to refer to the specific 
machines that power those ports. I treat "example.com" as nothing more 
than shorthand for the most /prevalent/ request, which is usually HTTP. 
The only way, however, to be assured that you are hitting my web server, 
my svn server, or my rsync server, is to specifically refer to it by its 
full name, being www., svn., or rsync.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( and i twirled my hair and i popped my gum )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
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