[plug] Virtual Servers and DNS entries

[James Devenish]

In message <008801c3773e$ee336850$b000a8c0 at richard>
on Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 09:57:40AM +0800, Richard Mortimer wrote:
> After a long battle to get virtual servers running under apache, I finally
> managed to get them working,

Sad to hear it was problematic.

> into several smaller domains for specific jobs (ie, use
> http://www.netfire.com.au for the main domain http://bugs.netfire.com.au for
> the bug tracking software, http://help.netfire.com.au for the application's
> help pages, etc).

Sure.

> Whilst this is working fine from within our firewall, I tried to access a
> couple of virtual servers from home last night and got a "Server not found"
> error - am I correct in having a guess that our upstream ISP have provided a
> DNS entry similar to (apologies for my rough mapping outline):
> 
>     www.netfire.com.au => 203.15.140.159
>     netfire.com.au => 203.15.140.159

Yes (though technically www.netfire.com.au uses netfire.com.au as its canonical
name (CNAME) rather than specifying the IP address directly).

> and there *should* be an entry that says something like:
> 
>     *.netfire.com.au => 203.15.140.159
> 
> Is that correct, or does there need to be a DNS entry at the upstream
> provider for every virtual domain?

The latter is normal. It *is* possible to do the former, but it is unusual and
you will have to ask your ISP what their arrangements are.

> Is this something that I can ask our ISP to provide to allow me to control
> sub-domains from our server?

You will have to ask Arachnet themselves. I note from
<http://www.arach.net.au/products/domain_hosting/dns/index.shtml>:

    "There is no additional charge on the number of entries in the zone file or
    the number of times you are permitted to make changes to your listing."