Websites hosted with freedom2surf.

[adamf2s]

Hi all,

Customers with websites hosted by us will have realised that in the past you cannot surf to your site without the www. prefix on the domain name. This has now changed and as of Monday all sites should respond properly if the www.prefix is used or not (http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com).

Kind regards
Adam

[kmount]

Cool ... And the custom rdns is working properly now too - Only way is up

[Ralph Bacon]

I always wondered how some sites got their "special" name, without the www. I thought it was some kind of registration thing.

Guess not!

I shall be trying this on Monday...

mine is not done yet.....

[adamf2s]

Guys, please be very careful when creating CNAMES.

Creating a CNAME for domain.com will break your email, this is why we have had to use A records..

Kind regards
Adam

[Justin]

Ouch, if I've screwed anyones email, you can kill me now! lol! Appologies to any inconvienence I've caused anyone!

Only reason I said CNAMES was because the www.domain.com enteries were, personally I confgure my names with A Records, I just kinda guessed that CNAMES would be okay....Silly me.

Trouble was I was more interested in making the DNS config look neat with a bunch of CNAMES, than I was doing it the technically correct way!

[kmount]

Hmm ... I use it as a CNAME on my personal nameserver.

[Ralph Bacon]

So http://mousemat.f2s.com works OK, but http://webcrazy.co.uk (which is redirected to www.mousemat.f2s.com does not.

Oh well, it's a start

[Justin]

Try going to the DNS configuration for your domain and add the following:

domain.com A 194.106.56.50

If the server has been setup to handle without the www and it's just the fact that F2S haven't changed the DNS for these domains, that should work.

[Ralph Bacon]

I've put this into my web redirection. Takes effect Thursday. Two things though.

1. There was already a CNAME entry with a freedom2surf web name, which must have been put in by f2s themselves, because...

2. I don't know what a CNAME is! I understand what an MX (Mail Exchange) record is, because I have had specify these at work for our websites. But I have no idea what a CNAME is (and why it can break email for a domain). Come to think of it, I don't know what an "A" record is either.

Can anyone enlighten me?

[Justin]

Don't touch the redirection, simply set up a new line in the DNS configuration with this

domain.com A 194.106.56.50

The one that is currentley there is for users using the www. prefix

[Justin]

A Record
An A record is a host address record - it allows you to map a hostname (Such as yoursite.com) to an IP address.

As it says on the DNS menu, a reverse lookup record is automatically created (this means that an IP address can be resolved to the domain name, as well as the domain name being resolved to an IP address).

CNAME
A CNAME record is used to create an alias for an existing name. For example, if you had one computer called computer.domain.com which was running a web server and an ftp server, you could set up two CNAME records, "www.domain.com" and "ftp.domain.com".

You can also set up a CNAME record to point to an external domain name. A CNAME record should always point to an A record or another CNAME record.

MX Record
An MX record is used for routing e-mails, and defines the bit behind the @ sign and the mail server(s) mail should be routed to. For example, the MX record for "email@domain.com" would be "domain.com". MX records differ from CNAME and A records in that they also require a weight value.

This value allows you to specify more than one mail server and prioritize them - a weight value of 1 has the highest priority, and any larger values have lower priority. You can also have two MX records with the same weight value - this will provide load balancing. An MX record should always point to an A record or a CNAME record.

[Ralph Bacon]

If you try to go to http://webcrazy.co.uk (ie without the www) you will get an Apache directory listing, not my redirected website!

My DNS settings for this f2s hosted site are:

webcrazy.co.uk A 192.106.56.50
webcrazy.co.uk MX f2s.com
www.webcrazy.co.uk CNAME server0019.freedom2surf.net

The first entry is the one I added as per your post. I guess there was something I missed? This domain was supposed to be redirected to http://www.mousemat.f2s.com! The "www" version still does.

Can you assist me further in this?

[Justin]

No, thats probbably because the server isn't set up to handle the domains without the www. yet, best to just remove it now, might be worth dropping a mail to tech support asking when they will set this up for the redirection server.