Unknown web server password prompt

Question

I'm running an Apache server hosting a single website. I've set up www.domain.com and it's working just fine. Howerver, if I browse to domain.com (no www) I get a password prompt with a message 'The site says: "."'. Initially I thought I must have a problem with my apache setup, but when I shutdown apache, my site goes down at www, but I still get the password prompt at domain.com. I've shutdown every process I can and I keep getting the message. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

PS. I also get the password prompt if I browse directly to the sites IP, so I don't think it's a domain/DNS issue.

Answer 1

Sounds to me like the '@' A record in your domain is NOT pointing to the same place as your www.domain.com record. This means that the reason you're getting the password prompt is because you're talking to a different server. You can check to see if this is the case by doing the following from a command line.

 nslookup domain.com
 nslookup www.domain.com

If they give different return values, you've found out why this is happening.