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Comment by wcoenen | Hacker News Reader

I'm especially annoyed by http://outlook.com. When I go there, I get redirected to a garbage URL on http://login.live.com, and then automatically to another garbage URL on http://bay156.mail.live.com where I can see my inbox. Yuck.

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Logging out on outlook.com is even worse. You get redirected to msn.com with its sleazy celebrity "news" and other dubious items. It's like you're in a renovated theater thinking this new interior design is pretty good and then after the show is over the exit leads to a back alley full of trash.

Welcome to Broadway!

I just did it and got blu172.mail.live.com. Load balancing is exposed to the user... nice.

Is that sarcasm? I think that's very common practice. I've seen google, facebook, and others use similar schemes.

Well yeah, it was sarcasm (for which I apologize), it's not good to expose this to your users. When does Google do this, by the way?

One example is this server, from which my browser just requested from youtube: http://r5---sn-vgqelnek.c.youtube.com/

URLs used for asynchronous requests seem much less important. The original comment's point was about outlook.com redirecting the actual url of the page (the one in the address bar) to a data center specific version.

They're actually letting you know what data center you're accessing as well. BLU / BL1/2 are "Blue Ridge", in Virginia (a few different towns). SN = San Antonio, TUK/TK = Tukwila WA, AMS = Amsterdam, DB2/3 = Dublin, etc. Sometimes there are multiple DCs in the same city, sometimes the number just means a different cage in the same DC, and between products you'll see different naming conventions even for the data centers.

It's fun what you can find out given those hostnames. It shows how a unified offering like Office 365 is actually just a few totally separate products, usually hosted in different data centers, that all happen to plug into the same user provisioning system.

I don't know about Outlook.com but if you use Office Live, you need to know that server name to configure Outlook.

We've recently had to configure ~200 users and Microsoft had us login to each user's account to find out on what server they were on.

Are you serious? That's crazy!

I am. I know it's not such a big deal but I would have liked to just have a list of my users and their configuration, I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to get and we would have been much happier doing the migration.

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