Silly DNS question

[Brian Chabot]

Ben Scott wrote:

>   The detective in me has to point out that doesn't necessarily prove
> it's Amazon's *DNS* servers doing that.  Their provisioning system
> might replace potentially problematic characters with dashes when
> creating DNS records.  This distinction is mostly academic, but I
> think we're in that territory already.  ;-)

Indeed.

I think we can all agree that Amazon *should* NOT be using underscores
in any case, for host names.

>> I don't know if Amazon's web server would agree, but their DNS servers
>> seem to think they are the same.
> 
>   Well, both http://thingiverse_beta.s3.amazonaws.com/ and
> http://thingiverse-beta.s3.amazonaws.com/ respond with XML, but with
> different content -- the latter a "not found" sort of result.  I'm not
> sure if that's the web server proper, or custom server-side software
> running behind it, that's getting confused.

Yup.

Found my reason why I got identical replies from DNS queries:
s3.amazonaws.com seems to have a wildcard CNAME to
s3-directional-w.amazonaws.com:

$ host somenamethatshouldnotexist.s3.amazonaws.com
somenamethatshouldnotexist.s3.amazonaws.com is an alias for
s3-directional-w.amazonaws.com.
s3-directional-w.amazonaws.com is an alias for s3-1-w.amazonaws.com.
s3-1-w.amazonaws.com has address 72.21.202.194
$


Brian


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