Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Originally posted by: The J
Don't most, if not all, browsers today put in the "www" for you if in a sense it doesn't find anything within your domain? I mean, if I put in "google.com" into my browser, it'll look around my intranet domain or whatever for it, but since there's nothing there it'll look instead for "www.google.com" outside your area for you. Is that how this works? I have a semi-basic understanding of how lookups work; I'm just wondering if it really is the browser that's looking for the alternate "www" option for you or if it's a DNS server "let's try this since I can't find anything else" thing.
msmsgs.exe can be disabled by going into "Add/Remove Windows Components" I think.
You're confused about how it works too. Intranet and Internet are both just networks. Saying intranet (lowercase i) just indicates that you're talking about computers on your own local network, or within your company's domain including local computers as well as remote computers over a WAN). The Internet (capital I) indicates the worldwide computer network to which anybody can connect.
The www part is just a subdomain, and is not actually required to browse Web pages. It just became a customary thing to use that to indicate that you're connecting to a World Wide Web server to view HTML pages. FTP servers are commonly named ftp.domain.com, but you don't have to have the ftp on it, and you could call it boogeyman.domain.com if you wanted.
When you go to a web site (the W ought to be capitalized but nobody really cares), you type a domain name into the browser such as
www.google.com. Your browser (or the DNS service on the computer which the browser makes a request to) first checks the "hosts" file, which contains a list of static domain names and IP addresses. The hosts file by default lists the name "localhost" as IP 127.0.0.1. You can add any domain name you want and statically put an IP in there, which would make the browser try to open the web page on that IP. It can be just a single word, blah, or it can be a full name like
www.yahoo.com. Many companies use a hosts file to statically map IPs to server names, so that computers can instantly know the IP, rather than trying to perform a domain lookup. For a small company, that can be better, because then they don't need to run their own DNS server, but for a large company it's better to have a local DNS server so they don't have to make sure every computer has an updated copy of the hosts file.
If the hosts file doesn't have an entry, which it normally doesn't, then the system checks the DNS server configuration for the IP of the DNS server, which is provided either statically or by DHCP when you connect to the network (your ISP). The DNS server normally has a cache of the domain names and their IPs, and sends back the response with the correct IP when your computer asks it what the IP is that matches a domain name.
When a web site registers their domain, all they are actually registering is the "domain" part of
www.domain.com. They register the word domain, within the Top Level Domain of .com. The www part is not always automatically registered. When you register domain.com and provide the registry with the IP address serving that domain, it's linked in the DNS records so that domain.com points to the IP. Administrators who want to make it easy for people to get to their site always register the www sub-domain to point to that same IP, so that people can either type
www.domain.com, or just type domain.com, and always get to the same web site. You could make as many subdomains as you want point to that same IP.
You could even make ftp.domain.com point to the same IP. The only thing that makes your computer connect using FTP instead of HTTP is what port the appication connects with, and what server software is running on the IP's machine. If it connects with port 80 (which your web browser normally does), then it gets the response of the web page content. If it connects to port 21, it gets an FTP server response, assuming the IP actually has ftp server software running. For most web browsers, they are configured to automatically assume that if you connect to ftp.domain.com, that it should try to use port 21, and of course ftp client software defaults to that port.
Some browsers like Internet Explorer have different settings for Internet and intranet sites, however it only bases that on whether you're connecting to a computer that's within your domain, not specifically what you type in the address bar.
Also the Windows/MSN Messenger application can't normally be uninstalled. You have to modify a particular file to make it unhidden in add/remove programs in order to do so.
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