thanks for the reply Peter. Somehow I missed that in the release notes for HF6!
Batish, from the release notes:
This release enables a default self-service portal (SSP) to be used, if no specific portal is specified on the URL. If a user browses to the self-service portal root virtual directory without the relative URL segment at the end of the URL, the system will look for an SSP record with the relative URL value of ‘system’ and use that. If no value exists, then the user must specify the relative URL value as part of the overall URL to indicate which self-service portal they are using in Afaria