[TriLUG] OT: Sub-Domain Services

Brent Verner brent at rcfile.org
Tue Jan 25 13:58:43 EST 2005


[2005-01-25 13:23] Scott Lundgren said:
| The recent thread on domains & registration got me to thinking about
| something I'd like to do and hopefully while the thread is relatively
| fresh there can be some recommendations.
| 
| I own a domain registered & maintained by godaddy with their anon/proxy
| service for the WHOIS records.
| The domain is pointed to the nameservers for my web hosting provider.
| 
| What I'd like is this:
|      www.mydomain.com is routed to my webhosting provider.
|      dev.mydomain.com is routed to my server at home.
| 
| Looking at cpanel for my account @ the web hosting provider I can set up
| subdomains though they have to point to directory in my account. I don't
| see a way to set this up within GoDaddy's account maintainance. Ergo I
| guess I have to look for another way.

  What _I_ like to do is have a wildcard host entry.  This way
I don't have to screw around with my dns every time I decide
I need another virtual host...  Register.com used to allow
wildcard hostnames, FWIW, but I've been running my own name
servers for a while, so I can't say if they've stopped allowing
this nice feature of dns.  GoDaddy might allow a wildcard host
entry, too.  If not, I'm sure someone around here (maybe even
trilug..checks...yes NS.WAYFARER.ORG and NS2.TRILUG.ORG) that
you could use for your name service.


  Now, tangentially related to my comments above,  I've always 
wondered, and even done a little investigation on, if having a
wildcard entry could pose some sort of DOS attack, where an 
attacker does something like

for i in `seq 1 100000000`; do
  dig host${i}.domain.com
done

Would this cause trouble to any name servers?  Mine? (probably not,
it knows it's a wildcard answer)  Your service provider's? (perhaps,
because it might cache actual host results instead of one wildcard
entry...or is the wildcard host a full fledged feature of DNS that
all name servers know about?)





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