Re: Beth Frank: Question about Host

On Fri, 29 Sep 1995, Andy Norman wrote:
> The clients often get URLs without fully quailified domain names.  They
> do a DNS lookup and get an IP address.  If they then do an IP to name
> lookup, for an IP address with multiple names, it's not clear what
> they get back.  So what should they be putting in the Host: field?
> 
> 	1) the non-fully qualified name (eg. sdg, instead of sdg.ncsa.uiuc.edu)
> 	2) or the IP address,
> 	3) or whatever is returned from the DNS name lookup of the IP address?
> 
> If we go with 2 or 3, we're no better off than before.
> If we go with 1, a non-fully qualified address, that's more overhead for
> 	the server to recognize a non-fully qualified names.
>
> We (server & client side) prefer 1.  That provides the most information, but
> will make server processing harder.

#1 makes the most sense to me.  It's not that hard to have the server 
recognize that a 

Host: vhost1

is most likely a base case of

Host: vhost1.domain.com

The server config files can make this explicit of course. Of course the most
common use will be to distinguish between a.com and b.com, or www.a.com and
www.b.com.  In that case fqdn's are sent all the time anyways. 

	Brian

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Received on Friday, 29 September 1995 15:12:56 UTC