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Comment by earthrise | Hacker News Reader

It's www.NSA.gov NOT NSA.gov.

www.NSA.gov IS up, at least for me.

Edit: I just talked with my American friend and it apparently really is down for them. It works for me up in Canada, though, at 23.6.100.226.

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and I get this:

Invalid URL The requested URL "/", is invalid.

Reference #9.c0b31bb8.1382761672.701091f

Yeah, you have to have 'Host: www.nsa.gov' in your request.

$ telnet 23.6.100.226 80

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.nsa.gov

[press Enter twice]

Or you can add www.nsa.gov with that IP to your hosts file, if you reallllly need access to it.

right www.nsa.gov is up, but nsa.gov is not.

How is that even possible? Shouldn't browser fill in www anyway?

Only as a fallback if nsa.gov doesn't resolve. In this case, nsa.gov and www.nsa.gov resolve to different ip addresses. domain.com and www.domain.com are not the same thing. One is usually configured to redirect to the other, and DNS is often the same, but it doesn't have to be.

No. The browser might fall back to www.nsa.gov if it's cached, but if you were to clear out that site from your cache, it'll keep trying to look up nsa.gov.

Some people don't know how to configure DNS.

nsa.gov and www.nsa.gov are two different hosts as far as DNS is concerned. They can and often do point to different places. This is a good example. www.nsa.gov is an alias to Akamai (a large CDN), and nsa.gov points directly to an NSA owned machine (because for technical reasons you can't have an alias or CNAME at the zone apex), people usually configure these machines to redirect to the www hostname.

Browsers should never "fill in" www, because as I pointed out, www might be a completely different host or service.

This is nice to know (and to everyone who have answered me so far), thanks!

I always think www.domain.com resolves to one of the ips and domain.com should too. Thanks!

I think the person making that many requests really needs access to it.

That reference # is a sign that it's hosted on Akamai.

  $ dnsname 23.6.100.226
  a23-6-100-226.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com

snorts derisively

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