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Don't even know what the subject of this should be
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:09 pm
by Wldrumstcs
I was wondering what it is called when someone has something like 'www4.domain.com'. What is the 4? A different server or something? Also, how on earth would you go about making something like that? This probably sounds retarded, but I wanted to know after visiting the site to register for the draft (yipee) which had this extra character after the 'www'.
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:13 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Just a subdomain I think...
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:17 pm
by Wldrumstcs
Are you sure? A subdomain would be like '
www.sub.domain.com'. The extra '4' was in the '
http://www4.domain.com'.
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:20 pm
by timvw
all these are valid subdomains of the "example.org" domain
http://www.example.org
www4.example.org
http://www.www4.example.org
www4.
www.example.org
im.too.cute.to.be.in.an.example.org
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:37 pm
by Burrito
just a different host record it is.
WWW a or cname record
WWW4 another a or cname record.
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 7:33 pm
by Wldrumstcs
So how would you create one? Not that I would, but I am just curious.
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:08 pm
by timvw
Code: Select all
timvw@madoka:~$ dig www4.domain.com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www4.domain.com. 3600 IN A 69.7.239.163
So that is how it is created..
For your own hosts you problably need to edit the zone file, setup a virtual host in apache and you're ready to go too..
Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 4:09 am
by onion2k
It's a subdomain as everyone has said so far, but it usually indicates that there's some sort of loadbalancing going on.
If a site gets a HUGE amount of traffic it can be too much for a single webserver to handle. So you get a bunch of servers and put a thing called a 'load balancer' between them and the internet. When a user requests a page the load balancer checks which server has had the fewest requests so far, and forwards the user to that server.
Setting up a site in this way is difficult because things like sessions only work if you go back to the server that processed your session to start with. One easy way to make sure you return to the right server is to name them all differently using subdomains .. www1, www2, www3 and so on.
The web server side of things is a peice of <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span> compared to load balancing and replicating database servers.