[2965] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Re: AFS space for the IHTFP Online Hack Gallery
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mhpower@MIT.EDU)
Sun Mar 22 00:59:18 1998
From: mhpower@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 00:56:05 -0500
To: nygren@MIT.EDU, mkgray@MIT.EDU, hartmans@MIT.EDU, webmaster@MIT.EDU,
webmaster-internal@MIT.EDU, sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU, ihtfp-gallery@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[0186] in SIPB Webmaster Internal Affairs"
>> If it wouldn't be a problem, I'd also like to get the cname hacks.mit.edu
>> added to www.mit.edu so that we can more easily move the gallery in
>> the future.
>I'm a little wary of this, but don't have any good reason to be so if
>noone else has a good reason why not, go ahead.
I think it would be bad to have a cname record for hacks.mit.edu
pointing to the www.mit.edu server (i.e., dandelion-patch).
Using the cname approach for associating different services on the
same machine with different preferred names generally doesn't work
very well, since users will too often refer to a service without
bothering to check what host name is supposed to be used. If you're
especially unlucky, someone will print hundreds of thousands of
copies of a book associating your service with the wrong name (this
is the situation with the names "sipb.mit.edu" and "rtfm.mit.edu").
Fortunately, for web servers it's easy enough to associate different
services with different virtual hosts, i.e., hacks.mit.edu would have
its own DocumentRoot, and thus hacks.mit.edu URIs would not be
interchangeable with www.mit.edu URIs.
So, if you want to use the name hacks.mit.edu, personally I'd
recommend getting another IP address on 18.181, and we should be able
to support that on dandelion-patch via a new logical interface.
On the other hand, if you want to advertise the service using a
www.mit.edu URL, I'd expect that, if you later decided to move the
service elsewhere, we'd be able to redirect to it "forever".
Matt
