[geofft]

From the article:

Should I redirect no-www to www?

Yes.

Redirection ensures that visitors who type in your URL reach you regardless of which form they use, and also ensures that search engines index your canonical URLs properly.

So I don't think you're advocating anything they don't.

[efaref]

Annoyingly, this can be difficult to do if the A record for your domain doesn't point to a webserver. There are other legitimate things it could point to, like an authentication domain controller or a session border controller. Do you really want to be running a webserver there, even if it's only redirecting?

[geofft]

I'm not familiar with session border controllers, but DCs can be and usually are placed somewhere at the apex of the domain, via SRV records.

If you really have trouble, you can tell your firewall to route ports 80 and 443 to another machine and everything else to the device you need. (I've run a hackier version of this that used netcat inside inetd: we didn't want a web server on the machine that owned the domain name, but there was another nearby web server cluster that we added a virtual host to. And we were fine running inetd and netcat on the machine.)

[seanp2k2]

I've done something similar but using iptables and dnsmasq to route DNS differently depending on where the requests were coming from and what domain they were asking about.