Want to catch any mistyping infront of your domain

by admin on Mar.18, 2007, under DNS

If you have a website and you want to make sure that anyone typing things like wwww.mydomain.com or ww.mydomain.com or even bob@mydomain.com put a wildcard entry in your DNS settings. Normally you would put an A record for www.mydomain.com and an A records for mydomain.com but you might miss mistypes. Another reason to use a wildcard dns entry would be if you have a ton of different A records that all point to the same place like 1.mydomain.com, 2.mydomain.com, 3.mydomain.com, 4.mydomain.com etc..

What you would want to do is create an A record for mydomain.com points to your website then create a cname record for *.mydomain.com pointing it to that a record you created. That way when you type in anything.mydomain.com it will point it to lookup mydomain.com.

One thing to watch out for when doing this is to have that A record in place before the cname record. If you don’t have the A record for mydomain.com and you create the cname record it can overstep all records for that domain. It can cause mx lookups, other A record lookups etc to be pointed to that cname. Ran into that one and since the mx record was pointed somewhere else when it was overstepped it broke incoming email for a while.