Creating 'vanity' domain names on the fly.

[steve.anon]

Hi - Any help or pointer on this would be greatly appreciated. I'm
working on something similar to blogger.com. Users sign up and they get
their own webpage, with a domain name of 'username.blogger.com'.

Since blogger.com is doing it on the fly (as you sign up), I'm sure
they are doing it programmatically. Anyone has any clue on how they do
that?

TIA,

Steve.

 

[Roedy Green]

Hi - Any help or pointer on this would be greatly appreciated. I'm
working on something similar to blogger.com. Users sign up and they get
their own webpage, with a domain name of 'username.blogger.com'.

Since blogger.com is doing it on the fly (as you sign up), I'm sure
they are doing it programmatically. Anyone has any clue on how they do
that?

The way DNS works, you can say to the world, come to me for all names
ending in .dyndns.org when you need to look up a name. You put a
fairly short expiry date on them, so that people will come back to you
rather than using the cache.

An any case whenever a name ending in .yourname.org can't be found,
the request will propagate back to you to make sense of the prefix and
covert to an IP.

There are a number of companies doing it.

See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/dyndns.html

and follow the links to similar services.

I suspect what they is build their own custom front end to tell an off
the shelf nameserver about the newly created names or which ones are
now recalled.


see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/dns.html

It contains a link to a book that will explain the software used to do
this.

--
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Complicit Bush-friendly media keeps mum. Rumsfeld confesses on video.
http://www.infowars.com/articles/us/mckinney_grills_rumsfeld.htm

Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
See http://mindprod.com/iraq.html photos of Bush's war crimes

 

[Paul Tomblin]

In a previous article, (e-mail address removed) said:

The way DNS works, you can say to the world, come to me for all names
ending in .dyndns.org when you need to look up a name. You put a
fairly short expiry date on them, so that people will come back to you
rather than using the cache.

Another way of doing this would be to have a "wildcard" dns entry, so that
<anything>.xcski.com points to your server, and then use Apache's virtual
domain system (or do it programatically) to serve up the appropriate pages
for any known value of <anything>.

 

[Chris Smith]

Another way of doing this would be to have a "wildcard" dns entry, so that
<anything>.xcski.com points to your server, and then use Apache's virtual
domain system (or do it programatically) to serve up the appropriate pages
for any known value of <anything>.

Indeed, probably the only rational way of going since IP addresses
aren't exactly cheap, and the idea seems to be that lots of people can
sign up quickly. If this is a servlet application, you're unlikely to
want what Apache offers (that is, treating different names like
completely different sites), and instead you'll want the same code to
run, but just with some attribute set to let you know what user's URL
this is. A ServletFilter is perfect.

--
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The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation