No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Originally, companies had a much simpler infrastructure and the prefix before a server let you know what sort of server was. So you can imagine something like this:
-mail.microsoft.com
-ftp.microsoft.com
-irc.microsoft.com
-print.microsoft.com
These sorts of services would have been in existence long before the world wide web became commonly used. When it started out, it was logical to put "www" in front of the server name.
Now, DNS is largely used for this purpose. You put "microsoft.com" in your browser and it resolves, and is sent to MSFT. The servers on that end detect what sort of connection it is from the port number used and other methods, then forward your request to the appropriate server automatically. Any variation of it will go to the same place:
-https://microsoft.com/
-https://www.microsoft.com/
-http://microsoft.com/
-microsoft.com
-etc.
Um, that does not really make sense.
These are all domain names and DNS servers are used to resolve these to different IPs. Always has done that job and still does it today. But
microsoft.comis a single domain name and DNS can only resolve it to a single address (or set of addresses). So cannot be used to tell different services apart.DNS does not know anything about
httporhttpsor any other protocal like that. It just resolves the domain name to an IP/set of IPs. The only thing it can do is pointwww.microsoft.comandmicrosoft.comto the same location so that you can use either to get to the webservers.The person you responded to did say that DNS will get to the correct place, and then other servers will route the traffic using ports and other information. They were a little too strong in that first sentence that now DNS does it, but they did clarify some.
DNS doesn't do the full thing, but it does do the first step.
It was also meant to be a simple answer rather than a deeply technical one.
These are all subdomain names. And subdomains can point to a different IP, or they can point to the same IP. They can also use a CNAME record to point to another [sub]domain name, and it's probably most common to have an A record on the main domain with the IP and just use a CNAME on the www subdomain so that it always points to the same place the main domain points.
CNAME is the record that is used to point e.g. www.microsoft.com to microsoft.com. They could use an A record for www.microsoft.com and use the same IP as the A record for microsoft.com, which would accomplish the same thing, but would have to be updated when the IP for microsoft.com changes.
The goal was simplicity, not accuracy. To give the "gist" of it to someone who does not know much about technology.