Re: OT- sorta - DNS

Its pretty simple, really. You can either:

1. in dns, point domainname.com and www.domainname.com to the same ip 
address

2. in dns, cname (aka alias) domainname.com to www.domainname.com, or 
vice-versa.

A real world example (cnn.com):

[root <at> kermit named]# dig www.cnn.com

www.cnn.com.            76      IN      CNAME   cnn.com.
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.20
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.28
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.20
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.52
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.84
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.16.116
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.4
cnn.com.                75      IN      A       64.236.24.12

(usefully, dig output is formatted like a named zone file).

In you question, you said "simply doing a cname to a webserver doesn't 
work" which makes me wonder: exactly how did you try to do it? Also, 
maybe you were tripped up by what the webserver thought its url was? 
Apache and most other servers have a config param to set the server 
name, where you might want to put "www.smallbiz.com" there. Also, many 
sites will trap the non-www name and set the webserver to 302 it to the