I configured the DNS immediately. However, one thing I'm not willing to do is set up a wildcard A record for my hosted zone when the request should be returning an nxdomain instead. There is no way in name.com's setting to enable that.
On an ethical level this is closer to typo-squatting, something that there are rules against.
> One thing I'm not willing to do is set up a wildcard A record
Why not? I'm being earnest here, I'm a name.com customer and I do have such a wildcard record. Are you building a network service that relies on nonexistent subdomains being resolved at the DNS level (rather than a 404 page or a redirect to a subdomain that does exist)? Or is it more of a philosophical thing?
1. I don't want to provide multiple entry points. As an intentionally vulgar example, http://f***you.example.com would resolve if using a wildcard address. That is unacceptable.
2. I'm in the process of setting up a self-assembling system that will need to be environment aware (public, staging, dev). If I redirect everything to a single A record I actually have to perform logic on my end. A failed request will instead mean to simply move to the next in the list. (Or that is how I am scheming for it to work anyway, not being built yet I don't know how it will turn out.)
I would much rather http://fuckshit.example.com/ end up at a browser error page instead of being redirected to my site. This prevents the clever person who decides to link to me with http://fuckshit.example.com/ as the URL. (And I use mod_rewrite for naked domain to www redirect, so I'm familiar with this.)
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I configured the DNS immediately. However, one thing I'm not willing to do is set up a wildcard A record for my hosted zone when the request should be returning an nxdomain instead. There is no way in name.com's setting to enable that.
On an ethical level this is closer to typo-squatting, something that there are rules against.
> One thing I'm not willing to do is set up a wildcard A record
Why not? I'm being earnest here, I'm a name.com customer and I do have such a wildcard record. Are you building a network service that relies on nonexistent subdomains being resolved at the DNS level (rather than a 404 page or a redirect to a subdomain that does exist)? Or is it more of a philosophical thing?
1. I don't want to provide multiple entry points. As an intentionally vulgar example, http://f***you.example.com would resolve if using a wildcard address. That is unacceptable.
2. I'm in the process of setting up a self-assembling system that will need to be environment aware (public, staging, dev). If I redirect everything to a single A record I actually have to perform logic on my end. A failed request will instead mean to simply move to the next in the list. (Or that is how I am scheming for it to work anyway, not being built yet I don't know how it will turn out.)
For most people the solution is very simple. Use a rewrite rule in your web server config. In nginx:
http://www.example.com/aboutor
http://fuckshit.example.com/about
becomes
http://example.com/about
This is good practice in any case, so that you're always serving up the canonical URL.
I would much rather http://fuckshit.example.com/ end up at a browser error page instead of being redirected to my site. This prevents the clever person who decides to link to me with http://fuckshit.example.com/ as the URL. (And I use mod_rewrite for naked domain to www redirect, so I'm familiar with this.)
Not that it addresses your complaint, but a wildcard CNAME will also work.