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Wildcard in DNS & Apache - Printable Version

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Wildcard in DNS & Apache - hijinks - 2005-02-25


Here is a nice idea for people that have like webhosting or just run any websites with subdomains. Also i often type a url like ww.domain.com.

 

So a wildcard will catch any not matched dns entry and point it to a IP. Say I have this simple dns zone file

 



Code:
                       NS      ns1.domain.com.
                       NS      ns2.domain.com.
                       NS      ns3.domain.com.

domain.com.               MX      5 flood.domain.com.
domain.com.               MX      20 web2.domain.com.

domain.com.               A       66.111.22.33
www                             CNAME   domain.com.




 

Now I add the following to the end of the zone file for the wildcard

 



Code:
*.domain.com.             IN      A       66.111.22.33




 

Now reload named.

 



Code:
service named reload




 

So that will take all random subdomains people may try and then send them to the IP of my webserver for example. We can easily test that

 



Code:
[root@web1 named]# host bla.domain.com
bla.domain.com has address 66.111.22.33
[root@web1 named]# host jy.rules.domain.com
jy.rules.domain.com has address 66.111.22.33
[root@web1 named]# host AHHHHHHHHH.domain.com
AHHHHHHHHH.domain.com has address 666.111.22.33




 

So now that bind is all setup we need to do the same for apache. You need to have your virtualhosting setup in apache for this to work

 

So we add the following simple section at the bottom of the httpd.conf file

 



Code:
<VirtualHost 66.111.22.33>
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ServerAlias *.domain.com
ServerName www.domain.com
</VirtualHost>




 

That is very simplified.. so you can always add more entries if needed like the logs or such. Now just restart apache

 



Code:
service httpd restart




 

Now you should be able to enter ww.domain.com into your browser and it should take you to your website.