Ask HN: managing subdomains cookbook

Pointer: google for subdomain rewrite<p>If you are using apache, and mod_rewrite, you can set up rewrite rules for subdomains.<p><a href="http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/4640.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/4640.htm</a> suggests rewrite rules to redirect a subdomain to a page/app on the main domain.<p>Then, use a domain wild card to point everything to your main www.example.com host (create an A record (HOST) to point * to your IP address).<p>Now, all example.com subdomains (hosts) will go to the A record IP address, which will be redirected to the program/pages/urls you expect.<p>Next, have the customer modify their DNS to point to your IP address. If you want, you can do the request yourself to their current ISP, to update the domain's DNS, if they're keeping their email with the ISP. If they don't, and you're controlling their email, too, go with Google's hosted email.<p>Now, this unknown domain is coming to your IP address. If you're using apache, set up the domain to go to the redirected domain. Easy way to do that is to set up a server alias, or have a virtual host that answers for everything:<p>&#60;VirtualHost *:80&#62; &#60;/VirtualHost&#62;<p>One way to do it, at least.

Wildcard DNS entry. Create an entry for *.example.com that points to your service and let the code figure it out.

Are you asking how <a href="http://www.morbidkk.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.morbidkk.com</a> points to <a href="http://morbidkk.weebly.com" rel="nofollow">http://morbidkk.weebly.com</a> ?<p>There are a couple of ways you can achieve this,<p>I use CNAMEs, this would be done by someone who controls the source domain's DNS, morbidkk.com in the above case.<p>The other way is to create a direct DNS A record which is not so flexible and probably not possible in this specific scenario since we are talking sub-domains, which are typically created as vhosts.<p>I actually don't understand your travelogue websites question?? Can you please elaborate?

<a href="http://www.intridea.com/2008/6/23/subdomainfu-a-new-way-to-tame-the-subdomain" rel="nofollow">http://www.intridea.com/2008/6/23/subdomainfu-a-new-way-to-t...</a>

have not run not such a site myself, so take this with a grain of salt. I assume that most use a database-backed DNS server like MyDNS, so adding/removing/etc subdomains is a simple db call.

Your examples lend themselves to confusing answers, so I am changing the examples to use my own examples, which are of course totally clear and correct.<p>Here's how the record in your zone file should look:<p>foo IN CNAME lalala.bigpipe.com.<p>The above (from foo all the way to .com.) should all be on one line. Note the . at the end is required.<p>Now let's say this is the zone file on your web site, googoogaga.com. Now after this record takes effect, people can point to:<p><a href="http://foo.googoogaga.com/" rel="nofollow">http://foo.googoogaga.com/</a><p>and they will get files from lalala.bigpipe.com, but their browser address bar will continue to show them foo.googoogaga.com. Nice, huh?<p>You do not need to have access to the zone file on bigpipe.com; you only need to have access to put your content files you are serving onto lalala.bigpipe.com. Well, that is, unless you are using their content files.