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General confusion about domains

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 10:57 am
by RandomEngy
Hey everyone. I've been coding HTML and PHP for a while now, but when it comes to how domains and subdomains work I'm totally lost. I have a site up:
http://duvet.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/RER , and I'd like to change the URL to get to it to something like http://www.rer-group.org or more preferably http://rer.vanderbilt.edu .

So I've got a couple questions.

1) If I registered for a domain, would I be able to make it use the subfolder RER instead of just the base (duvet.vuse.vanderbilt.edu) ?
2) Is it possible to have subdomains like rer.vanderbilt.edu use the content from duvet.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/RER ?

If it's not possible for subdomains to use content from another section of the domain, then I guess I could put in a page that forwards the user to the real site, but it would really be nice to display a URL like http://rer.vanderbilt.edu/index.html when the users are browsing the site.

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 12:53 pm
by phice
Register.com - I just registered my domain (PerfectPHP.Com) from them, and you can add new subdomains, and forward it to any URL that you want. In example, if I wanted help.perfectphp.com, I could forward it to perfectphp.com/helpme or even http://www.help.com.

Hope this answers your question.

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 12:59 pm
by RandomEngy
Does URL forwarding keep the original domain the user entered in the address bar?

(edit) I'm beginning to suspect it doesnt. So is there a way to have http://rer.vanderbilt.edu/index.html in the address bar, but the content of http://duvet.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/RER/index.html displayed?

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 3:11 pm
by MattF
URL cloaking is usually an option, you can have it if you want.

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 8:46 pm
by phice
RandomEngy wrote:Does URL forwarding keep the original domain the user entered in the address bar?

(edit) I'm beginning to suspect it doesnt. So is there a way to have http://rer.vanderbilt.edu/index.html in the address bar, but the content of http://duvet.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/RER/index.html displayed?
Yes it does keep the da.domain.com in the address bar.

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 1:41 am
by twigletmac
You won't be able to register a sub-domain under vanderbilt.edu as the domain vanderbilt.edu is already registered to somebody else (ie. the university). You have to ask the administrator (web admin or someone) of vanderbilt.edu to set you up a sub-domain. They could then point the domain to wherever your files are stored. Two sub-domains can easily share the same content. Granting and administrating sub-domains is at the discretion of the owner of the domain.

You can register a new .org address for yourself though. Then you'll be the administrator of it and will be able to set-up sub-domains (if your host or registrar allows it) and use it to cloak your original URL.

Mac

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 10:25 am
by RandomEngy
Thanks for all your help. My boss would prefer rer.vanderbilt.edu to http://www.rer-group.org, so I'm trying to get a subdomain forwarding thing going with Vanderbilt. Have no idea if I'll get it or not.