Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 15:19:51 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Nicole Harrington <nicole@nmhtech.com> Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: web servers and canonotical domains Message-ID: <19990423151951.O91260@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990422223142.nicole@nmhtech.com>; from Nicole Harrington on Thu, Apr 22, 1999 at 10:31:42PM -0700 References: <XFMail.990422223142.nicole@nmhtech.com>
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On Thursday, 22 April 1999 at 22:31:42 -0700, Nicole Harrington wrote: > > > OK, I may be asking a boneheaded question, but here goes. > > I have a mailserver and a web server for a domain. www.domain.com goes to the > web server. Domain.com and the MX record point to the mail server. Well, now the > execs want http://domain.com to go to the web server. > > 1) What is the best way to do this? You don't need to change the MX, of course, but you do need to change the A record. Theoretically, this isn't a problem: web browsers use the A record, MTAs should use the MX record. > 2) What is the best way to do this based on the fact that most of our > hosted domains are the same way and would be plenty upset if their customers > type http://otherdomain.com and got Our web page. I don't quite understand. I'm assuming you're running apache, so you'll need to tell apache which domain to give for each domain name. But that's straightforward. > 3) If I just take domain.com and make IN A X.X.X.X of the web server, it seems > many stupid mailers out there don't pay alot of attention to the MX record and > report no mailer daemon and bounce. That's why I said "theoretically" above. This is the one problem. Now you *could* say "forget them", but there's probably a simpler way: run sendmail on the web server and make the web server a higher-priority MX for the mail server. Then those few misguided mailers which send to domain.com A instead of domain.com MX will still get through. I don't expect the volume would be enough to worry about. > I thought of a perl script that opened a port 80 socket and simply said > "if $www.domain.com" then send BAD URL" (to prevent looping) > " if .$domain.com send error code moved permenently - (redirecting to > www.$domain.com) > > Would this work? Not really. Your problem is with mail, not http. If you really wanted to keep separate IP addresses for www.domain.com and domain.com, you could run a small web server on the mail server and redirect from there, but I think this is the wrong solution: there's nothing wrong with the web clients, it's broken mail clients that are the problem. > anyone done something like this. I don't want to route the web > traffic through the mail server and I don't want to route mail > traffic through the web server. I'm suggesting that you could afford to route some mail through the web server. I don't think it would be very much, less than 1% of the full load. You have alternatives, of course: either ignore the problem (people with broken mailers can't send you messages) or get sendmail on that system to answer "go away, get a real MTA". Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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