geeky entry to follow about wildcard DNS entries. 99.9% of you won’t know or care about this entry. =P

i had to migrate over to yet ANOTHER ip on my server. this time, i decided that i would be a little more sneaky with my DNS…err, rather, a little more efficient. but what i thought was more efficient turned out to uncover a misunderstanding i had about DNS.

it turns out that if you make a wildcard A record:
*.wilcopix.com IN A 192.168.0.1

that will match:
www.wilcopix.com
mail.wilcopix.com
wooha.wilcopix.com
etc.

but it will NOT match
wilcopix.com

it all makes sense now, but i totally didn’t get that at first. so i didn’t understand why this morning i couldn’t ssh to my domain.

i’ve got it all sorted out now. but it took some head scratching at first.