Shortening to go/ while on campus

If you are physically connected to the Middlebury network or using one of Middlebury's wireless access points you may be able to shorten GO shortcuts to "go/" rather than typing the full "go.middlebury.edu" or "go.miis.edu" domain. The shorter version "go/" will expand automatically to "go.middlebury.edu" on the Vermont campus and "go.miis.edu" on the California campus if your browser supports this behavior.

Supported Browsers

Adding a / at the end of the shortcut

Since 2013, browser have stopped resolving single-word host-names via the domain name system (DNS) and instead redirect users directly to search results if they don't see either https:// or a dot in the domain name. Unfortunately, this new behavior can prevent GO shortcuts from working in your browser if you use the just the shortest go/mail version. Additional text such as https://go/mail/ may be needed to convince the browser that you don't want to search.

For most people on the broader internet searching by default makes sense, but our institutional network is set up to resolve to the correct host when using only the first part of the domain name. For example our campus DNS provides the same result when you look up go and go.middlebury.edu. Likewise mail gives the same result as mail.middlebury.edu, www gives the same result as www.middlebury.edu, etc.

• https://go.middlebury.edu/mail - The fully qualified URL will always work for all users anywhere in the world.
• https://go/mail/ - This shortened URL should work for any browser on the campus network. It will not work for users accessing the internet from off-campus (including mobile data networks), so don't use it as the link destination in web-pages or emails.
• go/mail/ - This format for GO shortcuts may work in the browsers listed as supported above.
• go/mail - This will likely no longer work without advanced modification of your system.

Adding go/ as URL alias in Chrome

Chrome will usually send you to search when you enter shortcuts like go/bw. What we want instead is for Chrome to load the page at the go host-name which will then redirect us to our final destination. We can force Chrome to know about the host-name by appending a trailing slash to URL.

1. First head to go/ -- the trailing slash is important. This should send you to the GOtionary.
2. Future access of GO shortcuts like go/bw should now work as Chrome should remember that a host-named "go" exists and is something you visit.

Note that if you clear your browsing data you may need to repeat these steps to get Chrome to remember that GO exists.

Modifying your Firefox configuration

You can tell firefox that it should treat "go/" as a full domain in the address bar rather than a search term.

1. In the Firefox URL bar, enter about:config and hit enter.
   
2. Confirm the warning "Accept the Risk and Continue"
   
3. Enter "browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.go" in the search box and click the "+" button when it appears.
   
4. Close the about:config tab, your browser should now permanently work with short-form go shortcuts like go/mail.

Modifying your HOSTS file (not recommended or supported)

If you want to use these short versions of GO shortcuts off campus or ensure that they always work in any browser, you can modify your system's HOSTS file. This is not recommended and not supported and ITS will not be able to offer assistance in resolving issues related to this configuration.

See this guide or a similar resource for how to edit your HOSTS file depending on which operating system you are using.

Add the following entry to the hosts file to allow shorter versions of GO shortcuts:

140.233.36.135 go