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by rory096 3986 days ago
>http://go/codegolf

How does this work, some sort of TLD magic? (That shouldn't be possible, right?) Is it just routed within Google's internal network?
7 comments
jsmthrowaway 3986 days ago
Search paths. The full address is go.corp.google.com (which is simply a URL shortener), IIRC; however, I think the resolvers are also configured to respond to a bare name in a lot of cases as an optimization. They talk a little bit about corp in their BeyondCorp paper[0], which is well worth a read, and I'm speaking to ancient memory so I might be wrong these days.

[0]: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

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rory096 3985 days ago
Thanks for the link! Figured it was a bit more complex than just a host file, being Google and all.
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asuffield 3985 days ago
When you're on a corp device, your DNS search path includes google.com. It's not magic at all, it's over here: http://goto.google.com/

(You're going to see a login page that you can't authenticate to)

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dmayle 3986 days ago
By default foo resolves to foo.mydomain.mytld (man resolv.conf, section domain), so as long as the machines are configured with a local domain, this will work.
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ot 3986 days ago
It's probably resolved by the internal network DNS. You can do the same even with your home router.
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tperson 3986 days ago
I'd assume the same way localhost works on your computer.
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cornstalks 3986 days ago
It works the same as any other corporate network: either custom DNS resolution on the machine (i.e. /etc/hosts), DNS resolution in the internal network, or DNS resolution on the VPN. Or, more likely, a mix of the 3.

To get to go links, you've got to be connected to Google's network (either physically, or through VPN). It's essentially the same as accessing a computer on your LAN with its host name (in which case, the router can do the DNS lookup and resolution for the internal network).

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thrownaway2424 3985 days ago
Fascinating but totally incorrect analysis. All anyone needs to get to go/ is to put corp.google.com in their resolver search paths. Of course, such people will also need a google.com login to actually be redirected to the destination.
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darkhorn 3985 days ago
It redirects to http://go.com/
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darkhorn 3978 days ago
Okay, I've got it. Redirects because of my DNS.
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