You can set up a wildcard DNS entry for *.mydomain.com => IP address. Do this just
once ahead of time. I don't know specifically what the DNS file looks like for this, I
just ask my ISP (Verio) to set it up and they do...
Then on your web server you set up a name-based virtual server for each name you want
to catch (and you should have a "default" virtual server for everything else you
haven't specified). To do this do what Dave says below...
At 09:43 PM 10/14/00 -0400, Dave Watts wrote:
>> I want to set up a site so that anyone can create
>> their own custom site URL in the form of
>> MY_CUSTOM_NAME.ourdomain.com. In other words, I want
>> to be able to take any incoming URL that ends with
>> ourdomain.com and send it to a template that looks at
>> the machine name portion of the URL and redirects it
>> to the appropriate place depending on the first part
>> of the URL. The idea is to allow people make a
>> website for their company without me having to go into
>> Internet Information Server for each new account and
>> create a virtual directory for that account.
>>
>> So the questions are:
>>
>> 1) Is it a matter of a DNS entry to make it so that
>> ANYTHING.ourdomain.com will always be directed to the
>> same template? If not, how can this be done?
>>
>> 2) Are there any problems I should be aware of with
>> doing it this way?
>>
>> I plan to write a small ColdFusion script that will
>> then parse the URL and handle the rest from there.
>
>The MY_CUSTOM_NAME portion of your URL is called the host name. You'll need
>a DNS entry for each host name, and that entry will have to point to a
>specific IP address (an A record, in DNS parlance), or to an alias that
>itself points to an IP address (a CNAME record). If you point multiple host
>names to the same location, your web server will require the browser to send
>the host header name to point to a specific directory, or you could have the
>script you mention redirect the user to the appropriate location.
>
>In either case, setting up additional virtual servers in IIS won't be the
>hard part, given the number of utilities that exist for just that purpose,
>such as Lewis Sellers' set of CFX tags. Changing the DNS entries, on the
>other hand, might be more difficult, depending on what DNS server you're
>using, how it's set up, and whether you can access it from your web server.
>Most DNS servers use text files to store DNS entries, and most will probably
>require that you edit the text files to add the changes you want; they may
>also require a restart if they provide their own interface for managing DNS
>records.
>
>Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
>http://www.figleaf.com/
>voice: (202) 797-5496
>fax: (202) 797-5444
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