MX records ??

Evil Phil

Ok, say I have a site:

www.evilphil.com

and I want:

stuff.evilphil.com

to point to a sub directory on my site, do I modify the MX record? If so would I have to add something like:

stuff IN A 255.255.255.255

where 255.255.255.255 is the ip of the server. My MX records does have an entry for www. And... If I'm right (l33+ 5k117s ) how do I point it to a sub directory.

If I'm wrong I'll go do some more reading.

Oh yeah, my site is on an IBM AIX box, or so I'm told.



[This message has been edited by Evil Phil (edited 15-05-2001).]

wintermute

I think that you may be getting a little confused about DNS!

An MX (Mail eXchanger) record is an entry which indicates which machine(s) will handle inbound SMTP for a particular domain or sub-domain.

I think you just want a plain vanilla A record. DNS isn't aware of filesystems so if you want "stuff.evilphil.com" to point to a sub-directory on a machine, you will have to:

On the webserver:

Get a new IP address and reconfig the server.

For example, if the machine already hosts the site www.evilphil.com and a sub-directory off that has the stuff.evilphil.com site then you must bind a new IP address to the host and direct the webserver to treat the stuff.evilphil.com documents as a seperate site.

On the DNS server:

Make a new A record entry in the evilphil.com zone database to add the host "stuff" and point it to the new IP address you assigned to the webserver host.

However, there is another way which doesn't involve assigning any new IP addresses. I can't remember what it's called but it relies on webserver software serving out a different site based on what "address" was referenced in the initial HTTP call.

To do this (still can't remember the name!):

1. Tell your webserver software to treat the sub-directory as a virtual site called stuff.evilphil.com

2. Enable the "whatever it's called" feature on the webserver software.

3. Add a CNAME entry to the evilphil.com zone database pointing the host "evil" to the host "www"

The only problem is that some older HTML clients may not be able to access the site.


I hope that explained things. I'm doing a hundred things at once at the moment so apologies if it was a little un-clear - I'll edit it when I get the chance.

dahamsta

> The only problem is that some older HTML
> clients may not be able to access the site.
>
Very old.

wintermute

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by dahamsta:
> The only problem is that some older HTML
> clients may not be able to access the site.
>
Very old. </font>

Perhaps I'm showing my age!

However, I still often use an old version of NCSA Mosaic as my daily browser since it's fast, functional and doesn't support all that stuff that's meant to make the web more "interactive".

Anyway, my point is that I can hardly be the only person who may sometimes use "a very old" client so it's important to examine your server stats before implementing a system which may prevent core site readership from viewing it.


[This message has been edited by wintermute (edited 15-05-2001).]

Evil Phil

Cool, I'd imagine that pretty much covers everything. Thanks for you help!

dahamsta

Fair point wintermute. I'm happy enough to set up a default VirtualHost telling people to upgrade though. I know, it's a little nasty to the people running HTTP 1.0 browsers, but if I had to be backwards compatible that far I'd need a ton of IP's and about ten sets of templates to each site.