Is it not ridiculous that well-funded high-tech agencies like nasa don't have their direct @ url working? I can't access or ping nasa.gov, yet www.nasa.gov works. Are they being lazy, or is there a deeper reason for why they would do this?
Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
1–10 of 10 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#2They must have heard you. Works fine using nasa.gov
EDIT: using firefox. What browser are you using?
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#3Although a smaller scale, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has the same problem. bom.gov.au doesn't resolve to anything.
For what it's worth, Firefox will change nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov.au but won't do the same for bom.gov.au. Internet Explorer won't do this at all.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#4They must have heard you. Works fine using nasa.gov EDIT: using firefox. What browser are you using?
I think that's your browser adding the www in. Try it in Internet Explorer or try pinging nasa.gov
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#5I recall a time (late '90s) when microsoft.com was similarly afflicted. Seriously. That was back when everyone instinctively typed "www," though.
In this case, I'm sure it's a temporary glitch.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#6They don't have an A record for nasa.gov. For those who don't have dig (or don't care enough to do an actual DNS request and would rather trust some other, lesser tool):
$ dig nasa.gov
; > DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 > nasa.gov
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER $ dig www.nasa.gov
; > DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 > www.nasa.gov
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADERWhat's a "direct @ url" ? Now we're overloading the @ for something else too?
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#7This is part of a really old host-naming convention from when a domain name's usage wasn't 99.999% web. So people would relegate their world wide web servers out to www..
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#8By saying that it's not working, you assume that a raw domain.com is "broken" if it doesn't resolve to an address which is presumably the same as www.domain.com, which is pretty much baseless. There's no technical reason for a bare domain to resolve to anything, it's just a popular convention to make it redirect to www.domain.com because most people who type that into a browser expect your web site to come up.
Why not just add a CNAME for convenience? Who knows. They may have an internal technical reason, or it may just be a case of "don't do something unnecessary just because it's easy". For what it's worth, government agencies have a pretty good variety - army.mil and navy.mil both have the same behavior as nasa.gov, whitehouse.gov and justice.gov both have redirects to the "canonical" www url and house.gov and senate.gov both serve the same content as their www versions without a redirect either way.
Regardless of their particular reason, I see no cause to assume that it's due to laziness, funding level or how "high-tech" they are. It's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect.
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#9They don't have an A record for nasa.gov. For those who don't have dig (or don't care enough to do an actual DNS request and would rather trust some other, lesser tool): $ dig nasa.gov ; > DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 > nasa.gov ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER No A records. $ dig www.nasa.gov ; > DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 > www.nasa.gov ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->…
@ in a BIND zone file refers to the domain defined at the top of the file.
It's been awhile since I've written one, so go look at Wikipedia:
Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
#10By saying that it's not working, you assume that a raw domain.com is "broken" if it doesn't resolve to an address which is presumably the same as www.domain.com, which is pretty much baseless. There's no technical reason for a bare domain to resolve to anything, it's just a popular convention to make it redirect to www.domain.com because most people who type that into a browser expect your web site to come up. Why no…
It is "broken." You're right that "it's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect." But it's a convention that must prevent a handful of people from accessing their website each day, or at least causing them to Google "NASA" in confusion. There's no valid technical reason for doing this. It's a serious usability/findability fail.