HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?

7 points by jlm382 ↗ HN
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?

9 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 35.7 ms ] thread
babyboy808
They must have heard you. Works fine using nasa.gov

EDIT: using firefox. What browser are you using?

tdm911
I think that's your browser adding the www in. Try it in Internet Explorer or try pinging nasa.gov
tdm911
Although 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.

TrevorBurnham
I 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.

thwarted
They 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<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40211
  ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;nasa.gov.                      IN      A

  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  nasa.gov.               300     IN      SOA     ns1.nasa.gov. dns.nasa.gov. 2008043229 10800 1200 3600000 14400
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:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22541
  ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 9, ADDITIONAL: 0

  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;www.nasa.gov.                  IN      A

  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  www.nasa.gov.           300     IN      CNAME   www.nasa.gov.speedera.net.
  www.nasa.gov.speedera.net. 120  IN      CNAME   www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net.
  www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net. 21600 IN    CNAME   a1718.x.akamai.net.
  a1718.x.akamai.net.     20      IN      A       64.81.79.72
  a1718.x.akamai.net.     20      IN      A       64.81.79.70
Looks like the whole site is served through Akamai too.

What's a "direct @ url" ? Now we're overloading the @ for something else too?

zacharydanger
This 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.<theirdomain>.
zosi
By 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.

TrevorBurnham
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.