Page created:
Jun 19, 2009 (? ago)
Last modified ? ago
To main page | Opera Unite HowTo's

What I meant by CNAMEs


(This is an advanced technical topic)

Although Opera published a way to setup domain for your Opera Unite (which is good, means they have no moral objections to using your own domain), it is far from what I meant. That will only work for people with external IP (all of us behind NAT still have no options - Opera Unite itself works, but no domain love).

Is it a common problem? Well, my city has a couple ISPs, two of them that I use both have 1 external IP for thousands (it might tens of thousands by now) of people each. So, no one in our city can use that. And since there's less and less IPv4's left every day it going to only get worse.

What I meant was the following: ...operaunite.com currently resolves unrecognized domains to main site, try wrong-wrong-wrong.operaunite.com .

So if I make an CNAME entry:
mydomain.com CNAME mydevice.mylogin.operaunite.com
Then I make a query to mydomain.com, the request goes to IP of operaunite.com, with header:
Host: mydomain.com
OperaUnite's server sees if it can recognize it (it can't) and shows default homepage for Opera Unite.

But if (after getting the request) they'd do
nslookup -q=any mydomain.com
(in low-level commands, obviously), they would discover abovementioned CNAME entry, which then they could parse into "mydevice" and "mylogin" appropriately.

This means that even people behind routers/firewall/NATs could make use of domains.

/Although first Opera needs to sort out connectivity problems, those start to annoy me seriously (No server is available to serve your request)/

If you have external IP (even dynamic - check out the article ).

Slava V. [about me]


main page



Last updated


  1. Markuper (HTML templates)
  2. .ua
  3. Opera Unite HowTo's
  4. .us (files)
  5. Distribute Your Application
  6. 24/7 sites (permanent applications - idea) [stub]
  7. Issues
  8. HTTP Connections (AJAX/REST)
  9. Cookies
  10. file_wrap.js - File Wrapper
  11. Basic HowTo: Simple app (tutorial)
  12. Static images, client-side scripts
  13. Application Examples
  14. How to Debug Opera Unite apps
  15. Persistence & databases
  16. Opera Unite benchmark
  17. From PHP to Opera Unite
  18. Uniteness (Framework)
  19. Config.xml
  20. Key-value storage
  21. Widget Object
  22. Notifications (Growl'esque)
  23. Reset (debug)
  24. Cron example
  25. What I meant by CNAMEs
  26. Wish List
  27. Device Unavailable
  28. StopLorem (Opera Unite blogging)
  29. uniteness-0.11
  30. GET/POST data
  31. CRUD And Static (example)
  32. Opera object
  33. URLs
  34. Headers & Redirects
  35. Error Console
  36. JSON State (storing data)
  37. Security
  38. /storage/ (in fileio)
  39. Yusef library
  40. unite_info (a-la php_info)
  41. Javascript Imports
  42. onunload / _close
  43. fileio: Sandboxed Filesystem
  44. Request Hierarchy (like php_info)
  45. Intro: Web Apps with Opera Unite