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Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

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Re: Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

#11

Post by vertex-four »

jcr wrote: post #6
mkr-hn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had two options: 1: Email them and ask for myself, and only myself. 2: See if I could cajole the admin out into the light for a potentially interesting public discussion.

Well you got my up-vote. ;) The trouble is, the edgecast.com Content Distribution Network (CDN) is owned by Verizon. In theory, the `nslookup example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error, but on some networks like Verizon, the bastards are actually resolving it even though the IETF and IANA specs say it should never resolve at all. For notes, Verizon does transparent redirection of DNS r…

> In theory, the `whois example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error

Huh? No, it shouldn't. Example domains are, according to the RFC, permanently registered to IANA, although not through the "normal channels" (I suppose they don't have to pay for them).

example.com and other example domains resolve correctly wherever you are. They are not treated specially in any way (or shouldn't be, according to the RFC) aside from that they're permanently registered to IANA and that application developers should understand that they're example domains. The RFC does not prevent IANA from running any services on example domains, and they choose to run an HTTP server.

Re: Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

#12

Post by jcr »

vertex-four wrote: post #11
jcr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you got my up-vote. ;) The trouble is, the edgecast.com Content Distribution Network (CDN) is owned by Verizon. In theory, the `nslookup example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error, but on some networks like Verizon, the bastards are actually resolving it even though the IETF and IANA specs say it should never resolve at all. For notes, Verizon does transparent redirection of DNS r…

> In theory, the `whois example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error Huh? No, it shouldn't. Example domains are, according to the RFC, permanently registered to IANA, although not through the "normal channels" (I suppose they don't have to pay for them). example.com and other example domains resolve correctly wherever you are. They are not treated specially in any way (or shouldn't be, a…

You're right about the "example.com" and similar domains always being registered to IANA, and I even did a brain-fade on whois/nslookup in my comment, but as far as I remember, the example domains are never supposed to resolve to an IP? I'll look at this again after I get some sleep.

Re: Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

#14

Post by ejr »

jaxbot wrote: post #8

Based on what the other comments suggest, does the page look the same to everyone? Here's what it looks like for me: https://gist.github.com/jaxbot/a11d55ddaa12901162e5

Same here on multiple browsers. In case you're interested in what it's running : http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://example.c...

Re: Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

#17

Post by gpvos »

jcr wrote: post #12
vertex-four wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In theory, the `whois example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error Huh? No, it shouldn't. Example domains are, according to the RFC, permanently registered to IANA, although not through the "normal channels" (I suppose they don't have to pay for them). example.com and other example domains resolve correctly wherever you are. They are not treated specially in any way (or shouldn't be, a…

You're right about the "example.com" and similar domains always being registered to IANA, and I even did a brain-fade on whois/nslookup in my comment, but as far as I remember, the example domains are never supposed to resolve to an IP? I'll look at this again after I get some sleep.

They used not to resolve in the far past. Apparently they decided otherwise later.

Re: Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

#19

Post by jakub_g »

W3.org used to have up to 130M (!) requests per day for HTML DTDs [1], probably mostly from poorly written spiders traversing all the links they managed to find the crawled HTML pages, or clients validating schemas without any caching of DTDs.

Would be indeed interesting to get reliable info about how example.com looks in comparison.

[1] http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dt...

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