I have noticed that some Domain Registrars seem to offer an
integrated
web referral service. For instance, in the registrar's DNS control
panel, you can set a link from a DNS name <foo.bar.comto a website
subdirectory like <http://cis.boom.org/foo>. Anyone have a clue how
this is done at the level of DNS?? I could imagine that you could
point a DNS name like foo.bar.com to a webserver where a 'referral'
snippet might exist as the index.html referring to http://cis.boom.org/foo
but I am not aware of any public domain programmatic way of doing
this.... Any clues or suggestions??

Thanks,


Dave

On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:16:02 -0700 (PDT), dpsims@dpsims.com wrote:

I have noticed that some Domain Registrars seem to offer an
integrated
web referral service. For instance, in the registrar's DNS control
panel, you can set a link from a DNS name <foo.bar.comto a website
subdirectory like <http://cis.boom.org/foo>. Anyone have a clue how
this is done at the level of DNS?? I could imagine that you could
point a DNS name like foo.bar.com to a webserver where a 'referral'
snippet might exist as the index.html referring to http://cis.boom.org/foo
but I am not aware of any public domain programmatic way of doing
this.... Any clues or suggestions??

I'm not sure from your description whether you're talking about a redirect
or a proxy. In either case, you (or the company managing the domain) set
the A record for something.example.com to point to one of your (their)
servers.

For a proxy (something.example.com actually serves up the same content as
example.org/somewhere), you then have a record in the server configuration
that looks a little like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName something.example.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.org/somewhere$1 [P]
</VirtualHost>

For a redirect (something.example.com redirects to example.org/somewhere),
it's pretty similar, except you replace [P] with [R] and obtain the log of
redirects from a server log set up for that subdomain. Or you can rewrite
the request inernally to redirect through some custom script.


--
Safalra (Stephen Morley)

A Colour Picker Widget For javascript:
http://www.safalra.com/web-design/ja...colour-picker/

dpsims@dpsims.com wrote:

[...] you can set a link from a DNS name <foo.bar.comto a website
subdirectory like <http://cis.boom.org/foo>. Anyone have a clue how
this is done at the level of DNS?

It can't be done purely within DNS.

I could imagine that you could point a DNS name like foo.bar.com to
a webserver where a 'referral' snippet might exist as the index.html
Referring to http://cis.boom.org/foo [...]

That's how it's normally done, yes.

but I am not aware of any public
domain programmatic way of doing this.... Any clues or suggestions??

I believe F5's distributed fault-tolerant servers can do this as part of
their management console, but as I've not actually played with one I
can't given you a definite assurance about that.

Conceptually it's not hard to merge a simple HTTP forwarding request
system with DNS management; the forwarding pages could even be generated
dynamically from a database.

Chris