I've seen a few times now: an internet adress starting with http://www1.~~~.

(example is the site of DELL)

What's the difference between www1 and regular www? And what is the benefit of it ?

Err.. this is going to be rather long and confusing - unless you've got some clear-cut idea about how DNS server's resolve names. Still, I'll try to make it as simple and short as possible..

Lets take for example a website named www.abcd.com
Now you surely know that .com/.net/.org etc. are termed as TLDs or Top Level Domains - that's what you purchase (or rather lease) from ICANN. Along with a .com/.net etc you also specify a proper domain name that either matches your product or company.. or the theme of your website in general.. so in this case, say, we purchase the name abcd.com.. When you type this name in a browser it first contacts the root nameservers and tries to resolve this name to a corresponding IP address. If it is listed in the roots, good enough - or else the request is redirected to other nameservers which may further redirect it to others.. or as a base case to your own name servers - if you have them up and running (only possible if you've been granted a SOA or Start Of Authority by the root servers)..

Order of resolution is right to left:
www.abcd.com: .com --> .abcd --> www

Now, this www part before your domain name is known as the CNAME or Canonical Name. You'll notice, that both http://www.abcd.com and simply http://abcd.com will take you to the same place. When a connection finally manages to reach your own server through a chain of resolutions as said above - it almost invariably connects to abcd.com and NOT www.abcd.com.. Behind the screens, www.abcd.com is actually made to point to abcd.com while, abcd.com itself points to your server's WAN(internet) IP address.

So www.abcd.com --> abcd.com --> IP address

Now this CNAME is almost always www as an adopted standard, coz it's easy to remember as well as its an abbreviation for the World Wide Web. This www is actually COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. As long as you have your own DNS server's running, you can instruct it to resolve ANYTHING in the CNAME part - ANYTHING I repeat.. it could very well be http://aaa.abcd.com, or http://bbb.abcd.com or even http://a1b1c1.abcd.com - this "www" means absolutely NOTHING. (At the same time - do not confuse it with a subdomain). As I said earlier, since this is a world-wide adopted standard almost any and every web-site uses the www.. but occasionally some sites use www1 or www2 or even www9 ... whatever they feel like using. The crux of the matter is, that your own DNS servers should have a record of this wwwX name and be able to resolve it to the right IP/Server...

That's all...

Sorry I couldn't come up with anything simpler than this.. maybe someone else can explain it in a better and clearer manner..

Thanks microscopic^earthling for giving that explanation. I also have been wondering what that was. I have seen sites with www3

Just one question though, if you had your own dns server running, you could change the www to anything you wanted?

Also, I thought I might just mention it, if people are wondering what https:// is, its a secure mode of internet browsing. It means your browsing the site using SSL security

Thanks a lot MSE, I thought it was like The Internet Version 2 or something, :lol!

Yup - absolutely.. But before that, you'd have to apply for something called SOA (Start Of Authority) - which I mentioned in the above post. Once you have that, when someone types your domain name, the resoltuion request is directly transfered to your own nameservers from the root-level nameservers... At that point - it's completely on your own nameservers as to how they resolve that www or www2 .. or xyzabc.. in short it depends totally on how your configure your nameserver to handle that CNAME.



Yup - you're right again. The https stands for HTTP Secure - and you'll find it on loads of sites these days, specifically sites that handle monetary transactions. Normally your browser <--> Web Site data transfers happen in plain text. If someone has adequate skills and tools (packet sniffers) one can intercept personal/private information that you might be sending over to these sites. That includes Credit Card numbers, Passwords or any other private information that you don't want the world to know about... HTTPS takes care of this - by encrypting the data at your browser end using a public key - which is then decrypted at the server end using its own private key.. These keys come in the form of what we commonly call "Certificates" these days. The concept of certificates arose, coz anyone with malintent can create his own certificate and fool you into believing that you're entering a valid site... So a couple of certificate authorities were brought into existence - and as a rule, any site claiming to be secure obtains their certificates from these certification authorities - just a kind of a measure to establish some global standards on this issue. It's SSL security all the way

Regards,
m^e

wow , thankx for that info m8 , really didnt know what www1 or www2 ment , but since we are on the topic , i had this weird thing that just happend today ..

Our library set up this portal kind of a thing ( books in stock , availability , search etc ) .. now i know that the library would have to be connected to the internal college server .. but for anything within a network there is a web address thats understandable .. what i cant understand is that my Lib portal address is Http://library/ ... could u explain that ?

Regards

Yup, I think I understood a good deal about the naming bit from m^e's post. I actually thought all this while that it was really inportant to put in the www before a web address. Although I have put in addressess without the www before, I'd thought it was because the browser remembers the address and points to the address automatically.

Lo an behold, after reading the post, I'm now more educated than before and shall do away with religiously appending a 'www' before all the addressess I type in.

I never knew this all. Thanks man for sharing that knowledge. Now I wont use 'www' much as i have seen that many a times a site opens only when we do not use 'www' like in case of "http://artpad.art.com/artpad/painter/" .

Can we replace 'www' in our sub-domains at astahost also ???

Thanks for information oce again
Speedy

cyph3r

Working in an internal network, the name Library is just that name of the machine.

Every computer requires an IP address to be part of a network. Every computer also requires a name, I'm not sure if names can conflict on a computer either, so most likely they'd be different.

If I called named my computer Master, I know I have many ways of being able to access it. If I'm on the computer Master and I have a webserver, I could use http://localhost/ (which is a name already set up to point to your loopback/your own computer) I could use http://127.0.0.1/ (which is that loopback IP) I could use http://Master/ (the name I gave my computer) I could use it's network's IP (the IP assigned to my network card). On the internet, I could use it's external IP to access it (a static/dynamic IP I have on the web), or I could use it's domain name (which requires it to have a DNS entry which just points to it's external IP address).

They have chosen to use the computer's name. This would only work in internal networks. They could have just given you it's IP and it'd work the same way but what's easier to remember? You just have to realise that http://Library/ is not an address on the web, but a name used internally.


Cheers,


MC

Yup - even if you're running a NetBEUI based system under Windows networking environment (which doesn't require you to set IPs - simply computer names are required for communication) - you'd need different names.
And if you're using an IP based network, even then the names need to be different - either way, your system won't be able to hook itself onto the network, if it's name conflicts with that of another one.