William Astle wrote: > The DNS entry is required to direct requests for the particular > subdomain to the IP address where Apache (or other web server software) > is running. Without the DNS entry, Apache never has a chance to act on > the request because they never get to Apache. Instead, the user's > browser says "host cannot be found" or something similar.
I agree that this is how DNS works, but a DNS record for a subdomain is not required in my experience. I don't have a server setup that I want to muck around with right now, but I invite anyone running Apache2 to create a site file; tell it to look for subdomain.yourmaindomain.com; run a2ensite and watch your subdomain resolve instantly to the directory that you created. I ran 10 blogs on Linux World Net using this technique. I only had a single DNS entry that pointed to the main domain linuxworldnet.com. All 9 subdomains were simply Apache site files - no DNS entries. At a guess, I would submit that since domains are read left to right, DNS queries run until they fail. Once the search fails (as it would at the subdomain part that has no DNS entry), the main domain IP is provided. As long as the server that picks up at that main IP knows to look for subdomain X, it will handle the redirection. I should point out that I'm talking strictly web here. At not time did i ever attempt to create email addresses or anything for these subdomains. I'm not sure what the impact of not having a DNS entry in that case might be. > There is absolutely no possible way to create a subdomain without having > a DNS entry for it. You, sir, are wrong :) Try it. Someone must be running Apapche2 and willing to spend 2 minutes doing this. J -- http://www.jonwatson.ca +1.403.875.6048 _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
