My wife, Lorraine, has her own home page; http://www.lorraineprofeta.us
She used to host her website on iPower (they're still her registrar) but now
hosts it on my PC, Serval. After Lorraine dropped her hosting account, I logged
into iPower too redirect her url to Serval; http://lorraineprofeta.us
now points to Serval. Next, I went to the subdomain section of iPower's control
panel to redirect http://www.lorraineprofeta.us
to Serval, also. That's when I found out that iPower charges you to create a www
subdomain if you aren't already paying for hosting. I took the easy route, and
paid iPower, but whois (my registrar) doesn't charge me for subdomains. This got
me thinking; I never ever enter http://www.community-info.org
into the address field of my browser, but enter http://community-info.org
instead (less typing, and it brings up the same page - it's supposed to,
anyway).
I went ahead and entered http://www.community-info.org into my browser, and the page didn't load properly! I deleted the "www" from the url, reloaded the page and everything looked OK on my home page. I prepended the "www", reloaded the page and it went back to the bad load. The bad load being the drop down list for my music was missing and the slideshow in the upper left hand corner of my page wasn't running. Maybe whois was now messing with my subdomains.
I logged into http://whois.com and brought up a list of my CNAME and A records; http://www.community-info.org and http://community-info.org were both (correctly) defined. Just to be on the safe side, I deleted the DNS record for http://www.community-info.org and re-created it. So, my IIS web server became the number one suspect for this problem.
I brought up the IIS manager and selected Dave's Home Page; everything looked OK. I clicked on the browse link, and my page came up as the bad load! I tried entering localhost into the address field of my browser; page not found! I edited out the hosts file and uncommented the localhost definition; 127.0.0.1 localhost. I was still getting the bad load so I tried entering 127.0.0.1 into the address field of my browser; page not found! I thought I had found the problem, but no matter what I still needed to get localhost to load. I went back into the IIS manager and checked out the binding for Dave's Home Page; still bound to the ethernet local address (like it always had been). I tried changing the binding to all available ip addresses; all of a sudden, localhost and 127.0.0.1 loaded!
I clicked on the the browse link for Dave's Home Page (it's under the "Action" column in the IIS manager) and I still got the bad load; drats! I defined www.community-info.org and community-info.org as being 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file (now that I knew that 127.0.0.1 would load); still got the bad load. Then I realized that localhost/127.0.0.1 was getting a bad load, too; I had just been so excited by localhost being recognized, that I didn't even notice it was still getting a bad load. The only thing else to consider was the code in the web page itself.
Both the music dropdown list and the slideshow (the page features that weren't loading during a "bad load") make use of AJAX. http://community-info.org still worked (therefore AJAX was still working), so I checked my home page for occurrences of the string "http://community-info.org" and I had entered it in the sections for the music dropdown list and the slideshow. There weren't any occurrences of the string "http://www.community-info.org" in my home page, so I changed all occurrences of "http://community-info.org" to "http://www.community-info.org" and reloaded my home page; http://www.community-info.org now loaded correctly and http://community-info.org was the bad load! That was the problem; I couldn't use fully qualified url addresses anymore!
I replaced all url addresses with relative url
addresses (e.g., http://community-info.org/music.txt
became just music.txt) and all of a sudden both http://www.community-info.org
and http://community-info.org
worked! Now, you may ask yourself, why did all this stuff work in the
past, but has become bad code (without making any code changes)? I think
Microsoft updates are the culprit. Serval has undergone a rash of MS updates, of
late. Those MS updates don't just fix problems with Windows; they change the way
Window works, and by extension, the applications (like IIS) that run in Windows.
The next time a MS update happens on Serval, I'll checkout my websites too make
sure they are all running correctly.