[ceejayoz]

For the longest time nasa.gov required a www subdomain to work. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120326151831/http://blogs.nasa...)

> The answer goes back to the early 1990s, when the Internet existed – but the World Wide Web did not. NASA was on the Net very early in its history, and the nasa.gov Domain Name Servers (DNS) – the Internet's version of a phone book (OK, online directory) – handled bulletin board systems, Gopher and more. When the World Wide Web came along, www.nasa.gov became the agency's primary home online.

> Today the World Wide Web is still one of the many, many networked services NASA provides, all based on the nasa.gov domain. But along the way the web became the public's most widely used aspect of the Internet, so much that the "www" became almost implicit. It started to disappear from the URLs of popular websites. NASA never made that switch, and our domain servers still do not forward users looking for nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov. (Though many web browsers now do that automatically once you've visited a site.)

Looks like FAA might still be that way, or the changes are still rolling out.

[cholmon]

Indeed, faa.gov doesn't have an A record in DNS at the moment.

https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/#A/faa.gov

[riffic]

> domain servers still do not forward users looking for nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov.

Domain servers would never do this. Redirection happens through the HTTP protocol or associated mechanisms not through DNS.

[ceejayoz]

That's probably a finer detailed point than NASA.gov's public blog typically needs to worry about.

[EE84M3i]

One reason some sites used to be stuck with this configuration is that you can CNAME a www subdomain to a CDN but you can't CNAME your eTLD+1 without also affecting your other records (MX/etc).

There have been various solutions to this problem like ALIAS records, but perhaps they never upgraded.