.htaccess not working in Chrome/IE/Opera?

Question

I have an .htaccess file that is redirecting everyone to the www. version of a site. Like so:

      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^baldwinbrothersinc\.com$ [NC]
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.baldwinbrothersinc.com/$1 [L,R=301]

When I go to baldwinbrothersinc.com in Firefox or Safari, I am redirected to www.baldwinbrothersinc.com . Sweet.

When I do the same thing in Opera, IE7, or Chrome, I am redirected to a Page Not Found message (or a "DNS not found" message, depending on the browser). I don't get it. These are server settings, not things that are interpreted by browsers, right?

I know that the hosting for this site is a little funky (they are not pointing the whole domain to my nameservers, but instead are using an A-record to redirect web traffic) but I have no idea how to fix this.

Answer 1

That's because some browsers fix up the URL and add www.. The problem is not the htaccess, but the lack of a DNS entry for baldwinbrothersinc.com:

$ dig baldwinbrothersinc.com
;; (...)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;baldwinbrothersinc.com.                IN      A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
baldwinbrothersinc.com. 785     IN      SOA     NS83.WORLDNIC.com. namehost.WORLDNIC.com. 109030615 10800 3600 604800 3600
;; (...)

$ dig www.baldwinbrothersinc.com
;; (...)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.baldwinbrothersinc.com.    IN      A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.baldwinbrothersinc.com. 7195 IN     A       205.153.119.13
;;(...)

You have to configure your nameserver first to resolve baldwinbrothersinc.com to 205.153.119.13, too.