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[QUOTE=Guest;393006]Ok let me try. Please fill in the gaps...

When you want to view a webpage in the browser, typically you type some URL in the address bar, like "www.abandonia.com/en/forum". Nowadays our browsers are smart, so since you have not specified any protocol to use, it will default to HTTP, and prepend this, so the actual URL will become "http://www.abandonia.com/en/forum" - that's what you will see in the address bar when page gets loaded.
Based on this information, it can now create a HTTP request, which consists of many fields (you can think about it as a form to fill in), two of which are relevant to our problem - Host field and URI field.
Host field will be domain address part of URL, ie. "www.abandonia.com".
URI field will be the document we want to access from the website, ie. everything after "http://www.abandonia.com" - in our example it is "/en/forum" document.
With HTTP request prepared, browser asks operating system to send this request towards the webserver. Normally the webserver address provided by browser to OS is the same as Host filed in the HTTP request (ie. "www.abandonia.com").
Computers like to crunch numbers, so they know each other's addresses in IP numbers, like "94.247.169.19". They don't like the domain names like we do, so there is DNS, a service which provides "translation" from our domain names to IP addresses. Since we put into the browser the URL in human readable form, OS has to perform the translation of the name browser provided, to find out which computer IP address to speak to. So it asks DNS server what is the IP address of "www.abandonia.com", and in our example, recieves an answer, that "www.abandonia.com" has an IP "94.247.169.19". At this moment OS can wrap our HTTP request from the browser into packet and send it towards IP address "94.247.169.19".
When packet arrives to its destination computer "94.247.169.19", it will take the packet and hand it over to webserver software (Apache in our case), which will unwrap the HTTP request from it (You can think about it as when you order a book - it comes wrapped in paper with your address, and you have to unwrap it to get to the contents of the package). In the request it looks into Host field to see which website this request is destined for, and into URI field to see which document from that website to provide from that website. Nowadays a typical webserver handles more than one website, and some handle even 100,000s and more. This is called virtual hosting, since lots of websites are running without a real machine assigned solely for them - they are virtual in this sense). The Host field from the HTTP request serves as an information for the webserver to decide which of these virtual websites to use for the requested document. In Apache, every virtual host is defined in it's own configuration section, and has two important directives - ServerName and ServerAlias. When Apache receives a HTTP request and looks up the Host field, it compares the literal string with all virtual host definitions, to see if some ServerName or ServerAlias matches. If it does, it knows which website the request is destined for, and serves the document from that website. However if it does not find the match, it has a fallback mechanism, to use very first definition in the configuration (aka default virtual host).

To apply all this to our problem:
If you try ask DNS for IP address of both [url]www.abandonia.com[/url] and abandonia.com, it returns the same IP - hence the same computer is contacted in both cases.
Most probably Apache webserver has a virtual host definition for abandonia, which has [url]www.abandonia.com[/url] defined in one of ServerName or ServerAlias directives, however abandonia.com is not there. Therefore when you send a request for [url]www.abandonia.com[/url], that will be present in the Host field of HTTP request, and Apache will find the exact match in virtual host definition and serve abandonia content as you expect. However if you use abandonia.com only, Apache will look into Host field and won't be able to find that match in virtual host definition. Therefore it triggers the fallback mechanism, and servers the first definition configured, which happens to be [url]www.student.se[/url] website, and serves it to you (this is a matter of choice - is it better to serve an error or a (hopefully relevant) page?  Server is run by Student.se company, so the relevance is kind of there...)

A fix for this would be to put abandonia.com into one of these directives in Apache, so it can match it against the HTTP Host parameter in the request.

Hopefully it makes all some sense - keep in mind that I have tried to simplify things a lot, and since the whole topic is huge (only RFCs would take a pretty long bookshelf), I don't even know it all to detail (and I never ever would), so some incorrectness/omission is definitely present, however the core logic of it should be pretty accurate.[/QUOTE]

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13-01-2010 07:35 AM

_r.u.s.s.

cool, now the redirect works!

can someone make a newspost? i'm having a test right now

11-01-2010 08:34 AM

adnanba

It's actually not fixed, sorry. Must be error at our hosting company.

I 'll see what I can do.

11-01-2010 08:19 AM

adnan1

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Fifth Horseman

I'm guessing something with DNS. Student.se is another site of the company holding ownership of Abandonia.

I'll get in touch with them to resolve it.

Our e-mail server is not working.

Glad you fixed it, I doubt anyone of us here changed it. My be local DNS over there.

/Adnan

11-01-2010 07:10 AM

ollie

And if it's not the VirtualHost settings, it could be a redirect in your own .htaccess, but that wouldn't make much sense.

11-01-2010 02:32 AM

_r.u.s.s.

it doesn't mean that we don't know how to access it it means that other people get redirected to studentis website and think that abandonia went offline

10-01-2010 11:25 PM

rabadi

Why don't you guys just use bookmarks? Keep http://www.abandonia.com in bookmarks, and because the browsers are smart nowadays (IE excluded :tongue: ), when you type "a" then Abandonia link in the bookmarks is most likely on top or almost on top of the list

10-01-2010 01:47 PM

_r.u.s.s.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phreeze_lu

the server is somewhere configured to link the wildcard to /var/studentse
or so !?

actually no, studentis is on completely different server

10-01-2010 12:33 PM

arete

I got a 404 error about four or five days ago on abandonia.com and had a major panic incident.

10-01-2010 09:47 AM

Phreeze_lu

the problem already existed on 3.1

it must be a problem of subdomains. usually abandonia.com and www.abandonia.com link to the same ip in the same directory on the server (for example /var/www/index.html)

the server is somewhere configured to link the wildcard to /var/studentse
or so !?

08-01-2010 11:19 PM

Guest

I don't think it has been done on purpose - there are other "opportunities" which would have been exploited otherwise. For example HTTP Error Code handling is even set up in favor for abandonia website - try URL like "http://www.abandonia.com/en/user/475866"
(non-existent memberID) - you will recieve a nicely formatted page with website header and everything, along with access denied explanation, instead of old plain 403 Forbidden b/w text.
Similar with 404 Not found, though it eludes me why it redirects to first page of all games archive listing - would have expected a home page.

Actually I found out that only the "abandonia.com/" is doing the redirection - everything else on that domain (ie. "abandonia.com/anythingyouwanttotypehere") will result in 404 Not found, which is served by abandonia server 94.247.169.19 still.
Too many options how to achieve this "selective" redirect, so I'm not even going to blindly guess. Let's wait for whatever student.se admins come up with. My guess is it's going to be fixed quite quickly.

Unfortunately somebody already posted a quite rude new thread over at student.se (it's now on the main page under Senaste forumtrådarna column)

I hope this will not adversely affect their attitude.

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