On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Vitaliy wrote: > Olin Lathrop wrote: >>> I want to say it was DNS propagation issues, but when I looked into it >>> yesterday, the URL www.findchips.com got me to the new site, but the >>> IP that the URL resolved to (via ping and whois tools), got me the >>> old one. >>> >>> I don't remember enough about how the internet works to come up with >>> an explanation that would make sense. >> >> This is just a wild guess, but it might have been a TTL issue. =A0The DN= S >> records were switched, but the old one gave out a fairly long TTL value = so >> stayed valid in various caches. =A0Whether or not you got the old or new= one >> then dependended on which DNS server you asked, and whether it had the o= ld >> one still cached with a valid remaining lifetime, or didn't and therefor= e >> had to ask the official DNS server for that domain. >> >> Usually you set the TTL value low then wait for all the old longer lease= s >> to >> expire before switching DNS entries, for exactly this reason. =A0Or if i= t's >> just a web site, you can keep the new site a identical copy of the old o= ne >> until the last possible old DNS lease expires. =A0Apparently these guys = did >> neither. > > How does this theory account for the fact that the IP that the URL resolv= ed > to, pointed to the old site, while if you entered the URL in the browser,= it > went to the new site? > As of HTTP 1.1, part of the web browser's request is the full URL of the web page requested. The webserver can use the hostname in this URL to decide which page to serve. This is called "virtual hosting". A single IP address can serve thousands of hostnames this way. Or, as seems to be the case here, you can serve production and testing versions of a website depending on the hostname part of the URL. Regards, Mark markrages@gmail --=20 Mark Rages, Engineer Midwest Telecine LLC markrages@midwesttelecine.com --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .