[PLUG] Allow URL w/o 'www' to reach web site

[Jim Garrison]

On 8/11/2014 5:11 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
>    Anyone trying to reach my company web site by entering
> http://appl-ecosys.com sees a page with the text, "It works!". The www needs
> to be pre-pended to the domain in order to get to the site. The site is
> hosted by aracnet/spiritone, not my me.

[jhg at perseus ~]$ dig www.appl-ecosys.com
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.appl-ecosys.com.           IN      A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.appl-ecosys.com.    1699    IN      A       216.99.193.149

OK, your site is hosted at IP address 216.99.193.149.  Browsing to this
IP address brings up a default hosting page, so you are on a shared host
and the website to serve up is determined by the "Host" header that is
sent by the browser.  Let's look at the other address:

[jhg at perseus ~]$ dig appl-ecosys.com
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appl-ecosys.com.               IN      A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
appl-ecosys.com.        65      IN      A       50.38.87.100

A different IP, which is why entering just appl-ecosys.com does not
return what you expect. When I tried it I got a timeout, but we're not
going to the same host so that's expected.

More disturbingly:

[jhg at perseus ~]$ dig appl-ecosys.com mx
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;appl-ecosys.com.               IN      MX

No answer section, meaning there's no MX record for your domain,
meaning your email is misconfigured.  It's working only because
the appl-ecosys.com points at your mail server.  If you were to
change it to point to the web server without adding an MX record,
your email would stop working.

Your DNS is misconfigured and needs to be fixed. The following
need to happen:

1) Create an MX record for the domain appl-ecosys.com that points
   to your mail server 50.38.87.100

2) Modify the existing A record for the domain appl-ecosys.com to
   point to your WEB server 216.99.193.149

3) Modify the existing A record for www.appl-ecosys.com to a
   CNAME record pointing to appl-ecosys.com

4) Have your web hosting company change the configuration so that
   both hostnames (appl-ecosys.com and www.appl-ecosys.com) are
   recognized as referring to your website.

-- 
Jim Garrison (jhg at acm.org)
PGP Keys at http://www.jhmg.net RSA 0x04B73B7F DH 0x70738D88