Stock answer to "why doesn't sfu.ca work"

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Yes, this problem is on our radar -- it's actually one of my pet peeves :-)

The problem with the resolution of "http://sfu.ca" links is related to a
very early installation of a domain server for Microsoft Active
Directory that was allocated the DNS entry "sfu.ca".  This was prior to
the existence of sites like "slashdot.net" that were among the earliest
sites to forgo the "www." prefix. At the time (in the mid-1990s), all
services on the internet were typically prefixed with the protocol as
part of their name (eg. ftp.sfu.ca, www.sfu.ca, gopher.sfu.ca, etc.)

Generally one should be able to resolve the problem by configuring the
SFU DNS entry for Active Directory to only use the DNS "SRV" record to
serve Active Directory requests enabling A or C records to be used for
things like our web presence, and this change was attempted during
recent Active Directory upgrades: however, some third-party software and
hardware was found to ignore the "SRV" record, making some services such
as printing in the labs and various other departmental services fail as
a result of that change. That meant we had to fall back to the old
configuration and could not deploy 'sfu.ca' for the web.


Unfortunately, it's a simple issue to identify, but the number of
related services that are affected make it a complex issue to actually
resolve (this includes over 7000 desktop computers and several hundred
servers that would need to be reconfigured to address this directly
within AD)

There is a resolution coming, but it will still take some time as it
requires a differential resolution of "sfu.ca" for on- and off-campus
users.  The first step of the required changes have been put in place,
but we may not see "sfu.ca" available directly for some months yet.

Please let me know if you have any questions.