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I was troubleshooting a dns issue and meant to ping www.sun.ac.za (local town university) and made a typo while specifying the host. I specified www0.sun.ac.za and to my surprise the pings replied. How is this possible?

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quite simply - www0.sun.ac.za is a registered dns record (IP is 146.232.66.100), take a look at:

http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=dnsrec&host=www0.sun.ac.za

a dns record doesn't have to be www.xxx.com or similar, it can be anything...

try to think of it as "ac" is a record within "za", "sun" is a record within "ac", "www0" is a record within "sun". HP do something similar... http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/drivers.html being an example!

for most domains - "www" is just an "A" type record named "WWW" because its for their World Wide Website. If someone chooses to use www0, www8, even wxyz.mydomain.com, although unconventional - this is still perfectly valid.

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