Sub domains at the speed of light?

[Barney]

Hi all

Does anyone know of a way I could get subdomains to resolve instantly. What I'm looking for is some way of having either Apache or PHP (or something else?) resolve a subdomain, so that if someone types in:

1. blimey.domain.com, or
2. yeeha.domain.com, or
3. anythingTheYJOLLYwellLikE.domain.com

the script/page will redirect/resolve to:

1. www.domain.com/index.php?page=blimey
2. www.domain.com/index.php?page=yeeha
3. http://www.domain.com/index.php?page...YJOLLYwellLikE

etc etc.

Thanks a lot!

[speed]

First you need to setup a wildcard for the domain in the DNS records e.g.

*.example.com.      IN  A    1.2.3.4

Second you need to edit httpd.conf to set the ServerName to the same wildcard, e.g.

<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias *.example.com
....
</VirtualHost>

[Barney]

Thanks for that Speed, I'll give it a go. I'm on Dreamhost shared hosting with this domain, so see how it goes!

[speed]

In that case you'll have to ask them to configure it for you.

[Barney]

I've got access to DNS, although not httpd.conf - could I achieve it through .htaccess?

[speed]

The .htaccess file is only run if the server recognises the domain being requested.

On cPanel you can login to your account and create a sub-domain called * and it will set up all the DNS and httpd.conf for you.

However as far as I know Dreamhost don't use cPanel hence the reason I said they'll need to do it for you, that is unless their control panel allows a subdomain * to be created.

[Barney]

Pity - I just tried to set up a subdomain within Dreamhost's control panel, and it unfortunately has to be alphanumeric.

Back to the drawing board!

[speed]

In that case you have 2 options as I see it a) ask their support to set it up for you or b) put the site with a host that can do it.

Alternatively do you really need wildcard subdomains or could you do it with a folder structure e.g.

example.com/test/
example.com/another/

You could still rewrite it in .htaccess to be example.com/index.php?page=test or whatever.

[Barney]

Well I've got the problem that I don't know what the subdomain is going to be - it can be user generated, and could be anything alphanumeric.

Perhaps I should write to them and see if they can add those lines into httpd.conf - you never know.