to www or not to www?

To www or not to www that is the question... well really the question is where the h3ll did my www go.

I have a friend with a sbs2000 server hosting her own website.

It was working fine with her "site under construction" default.htm

She had a site professionally designed and I loaded it on the server for her, but since the site was huge I relocated it to a new location on her server and changed the default website location in iis manager. Then poof!

You can access her site at ai-tn-usa.com (hyperlink won't work without the www, sorry have to c&p) but not at www.ai-tn-usa.com I moved most of the site back to the default location and changed iis manager location back to the default and it's finding the site from there (at least all of it I put there) but no matter what I do, it can't be found with the www prefix.


Any ideas?

Thanks

Architect's International ? is that the website?

I used http://ai-tn-usa.com/ for the url and no as you can see the www is not needed all the time.

As a example just look at the url for this page. It is http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...hreadid=170848 and as you can see there is no www.

Well, first of all, SBS sites are not directly accesable from the internet. You have to go thru a VPN connection to hit the Share Portal Site (or intranet).

Go to: www.carolinacomputers.us and you will see what I am talking about.

Train,

Yes that's the site. However I know it will work without the www in the url, the problem is it won't work at all with www in the url.

So when 90% of the people try to go to her site the first time they get a cannot find server or dns error.


Jmwillis,

I don't know about sbs2003, most of that site was directed at configuring sbs2003.

I have sbs2000 but it definately is directly accessable to the internet if you configure it properly, (I'm betting this is where my trouble is) and you open port 80 in your firewall, and you have your isp direct incoming port 80 traffic to your static ip. The problem is it WAS working with the site under construction default page, only when I moved the website did it stop working. And now it won't work even when I move it back.

Thanks for your help, any further ideas?

As far as I remember, the www prefix is the name of the computer. So you would either have to rename the computer, or give it an alias of www.

Or create another DNS record to also point to the web server

I think Rapmaster hit the nail on the head. ai-tn-usa.com is the primary domain name and would appear to resolve to the webserver. But www.ai-tn-usa.com is a sub-domain of ai-tn-usa.com and the DNS server records need to be updated to reflect this. The "www" sub-domain would be set to point to the webserver. (It's similar to the way that an organization would point mail.company.com to their mail server, or ftp.company.com to their ftp server... even if all those services are running on the same server).

This would be done either via a DNS server the organization in question, or through their service provider, depending on their setup.

If the DNS is being hosted locally and running on MS Windows Server, it can be configured to fall back to WINS resolution if it can't resolve a full domain name reference, so in this case changing the name of the web server to "www" should do the job as Usil pointed out.

Hope this helps...?

KV