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Comment by ralphshao | Hacker News Reader

Looks like just misconfigured web server. www.nsa.gov works fine vs. nsa.gov times out.

Edit: www goes to an Akamai CDN vs bare domain goes to a straight IP address.

NASA is also configured this way. It drives me nuts because half the time when I want to visit NASA's site I type `nasa.gov` and get nothing until I remember they need the `www.`. It might just be common to how some government sites are configured.

Clickable links:

http://nasa.gov/

http://www.nasa.gov/

Here is a NASA article about why they don't have the redirection : http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/nasadotgov/posts/post_13068608...

I hate it when people do this. Can we just pretend www doesn't exist anymore?

Servers with archaic configurations are quite difficult to change like that. Besides, I can reasonably assume the NSA, like most major government agencies, uses some wonky, overly complicated rats' nest of a CMS that croaks with/out the www.

The problem I've always had with this is that DNS root levels (., no www) can't be a CNAME - unless there are any DNS gurus in the audience that can point to some alternate configuration I've overlooked.

No, you're right - it's a serious limitation. Ultimately just a trade-off to consider. As with anything, neither is obviously superior.

You can always just serve a redirect to www.example.com. Doesn't have to be a high-powered redundant server or anything (just secure).

We force the www. at work because of DNS limitations.

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