Re: IP to URL conversion
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Aug 14, 2015
- 2143 views
An IP address doesn't have to be mapped to a domain at all, if you wanted to you could force others to remeber and use the raw ip address to get to your site.
Right.
It's also true that on occasion a hostname like fanciful.dev.shennanigans needs to be used in the request header to obtain a valid response, but this needn't be a "pukka" domain available via public DNS (ie, someone accessing the site via their browser needs to have manually mapped it in their local hosts file, or their app needs to set that header explicitly).
Agreed. This makes more sense for something like a corporate intranet, where names can only be resolved within the corporate network but not outside of it.
As an aside, it's recommended that the .local tld ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local ) be used for such networks, as that's reserved and guaranteed not to ever be taken. Whereas, someone setting up an intranet domain at who.wants.to.troll.a.dev might one day find that their fanciful .dev tld has been taken (e.g. http://icannwiki.com/.dev ).
Naturally, not everyone follows the standards. (The .local tld was only reserved for this use in feb 2013 IIUC, so there's probably a lot of legacy cases where an intranet was set up before this and it's considered too expensive to rename everything.)
