[Apfhex]

Since switching to Comcast today (after wrestling with tech support to get my connection actually WORKING—had to do with proxy settings, had to turn them all off), I've noticed that unlike with my previous DSL provider, I can no longer type in shortened URL's like 'apple' to go to www.apple.com. Is this something I'm going to have to deal with from Comcast, or is there something I can do?

[ghporter]

Your previous DSL provider-or the hardware they provided-handled the shortcut URLs for you. This could be done either by the modem (almost all DSL modems are a lot more than just a modem) or by the provider's DNS servers. Either way, the shortcuts were done by them.

Just deal with the full URLs, and bookmark places you visit regularly. It's like remembering that in some markets you have to dial the area code with the seven-digit phone number-not a big deal once you get used to it.

[Apfhex]

Ok. I guess my DSL provider was better than I thought. For most addresses, I can get away with just the suffix and no www, and I already have bookmarked most regular sites anyway. I really liked that convenience though.

[chabig]

I disagree. It's the browser that automatically puts www in there for you. Safari does it. So does IE. What browser are you using?

Chris

[Apfhex]

Safari 2.0. I've changed nothing in the software. Only my ISP has changed. Behavior is the same in another user account, and in other browsers (Firefox, IE). What happens is that it "loads" a blank page.

[ghporter]

chabig, the browser will automatically supply "www" in most cases, and it will automatically check for the most likely top level domain, too. But several ISPs provide this "shortcut" service for one reason or another-usually to lull their customers into depending on having the shortcut so when they leave they can't find anything. Either way, changing from one ISP to another will NOT change your browser settings, so the browser itself is not at fault here.

[chabig]

I never knew ISPs could do this. How? Does their name server do it behind the scenes and return the IP address of the real site?

[tooki]

A browser will never add the www. and .com as the first step. The first thing it'll do is try the single word as a hostname -- the network's DNS server will look for that as a subdomain. (For example, if I'm at school and type www, the school DNS server will automatically assume I mean the umbc.edu domain, and resolve me to www.umbc.edu.)

If that lookup fails, THEN it will go and try it as www.xxx.com.

If the DNS server isn't behaving right, the browser will never move to the second step, and single-word URLs will fail.

I suggest running local DNS -- Comcast's DNS is notoriously flaky.

tooki

[ghporter]

tooki, you beat me to it. The only time a browser will add either a prefix or suffix (the "www." part or the ".com" part respectively) is if it can't resolve the URL through the assigned DNS server(s). To get what Apfhex is talking about to work, an ISP could simply arrange a local DNS server that mirrors an authoritative server but adds these "shortcuts." Since their server would resolve the URL "apple" to a useable IP address, the browser would simply run with it. As tooki says, the DNS server has to either resolve or reply with a failure to resolve for the browser to do anything, either using the returned IP, or try some different combination. A DNS stall, though very rare, is maddening to troubleshoot because there's almost no way to see that the DNS server is what's causing the problem. (This happens on small, ISP-unique servers when they don't have enough horsepower to handle the load and thus can't return any state to the client.)

[Apfhex]

I see. So what I'm experiencing is the proper behavior, I suppose. Seems like sites like apple.com DO load after a relatively long while, if I leave the suffix out, though before today that didn't seem to be happening (they'd time out, or give me a blank page). Thanks for the info though, I've learned a lot about DNS since switching to Comcast (and I've read about their supposedly flaky DNS service—guess I'll see). I'll just get back into the habbit of adding the suffix then.