Wildcard Subdomains

[hosh]

Hi,
I'm wanting to setup a website where people can sign up for accounts where they can have their own subdomain websites. Their access will be very limited, only a web based admin interface. Anyway, I want a setup similar to that of freeservers.com. If you type in anysubdomain.freeservers.com, and it's not taken, you'll be presented a page where you can sign up for the name.

Ok, let's say my domain name is mydomain.com, also "anything" refers to literally any name. In WHM, I created an A record with *.mydomain.com. as the domain, and 70.84.234.226 for the IP address. So now I can ping anything.mydomain.com. When I try to access http://anything.mydomain.com it shows the cPanel "There is no website configured at this address" message. I'm assuming this is the default in the httpd.conf file so it shows when anything.mydomain.com (*.mydomain.com) is in the DNS but not in httpd.conf. I need an httpd.conf setup something like this:
<VirtualHost *> # For the main website
ServerName mydomain.com
ServerAlias www.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /home/mydomain/public_html
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *> # For the subdomains
ServerName mydomain.com
ServerAlias *.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /home/mydomain/client_site
</VirtualHost>
Then someone.mydomain.com and somethingelse.mydomain.com would be served from the same directory (/home/mydomain/client_site). (A PHP script would choose the user to display based on the HOST header or site avaiable message if it's available.)

Is there anyway to do wildcard configurations in WHM? Or would I need a dedicated server for something like this?

Thanks.
Josh

[JZ]

Why would you want to do that? It seems that the easier route would be just to create the subdomain account in whm. For example, when you create a new account in whm you would create domain.tld. In this case put subdomain.domain.tld. you can control the features with a feature list on the package and make the disabled features even less visible with rvskin.

- Justin

[hosh]

I'm sorry, I wasn't very clear on what I wanted. I want all of the subdomains to be under domain.tld (someone.domain.tld, someoneelse.domain.tld). I *don't* want each subdomain account to have a separate cPanel. These will be, more or less, canned websites. So each one will have an index.php, guestbook.php, photos.php, etc. That's why I want all of the subdomains to point to the same directory. (/home/domain/client_site or something) I won't go into the details of the actual content because I'm still in the planning phase. So the user will login to theirsubdomain.domain.tld/admin and control their website only there.

Josh

[JZ]

What you are planning here certainly sounds plausible, although it would take quite a bit of planning. I do not think that it would be suitable for a shared hosting environment because of abuse risks associated implementing this. I do not think that HG would be willing to put other websites in jeopardy even if it is a small risk. For custom configurations like this, a dedicated server is probably the route to go. Before you take that leap, I would suggest getting it to work on your home system first by downloading apache and configuring the httpd.conf, write the scripts and see if it is something that you can accomplish.

Best of luck

- Justin

[hosh]

Yeah...I was just wanting to know if an httpd.conf setup like this was possible with only my access to WHM as a reseller. I could even use subdomains from cPanel and have a Perl script add subdomains to the website. Can you update cPanel with Perl or something? I know you can make changes in WHM remotely. A VPS plan may be good for starting out. Any future plans for HG to offer VPS plans?

I actually use Linux nearly exclusively on my computers, including on the desktop. I've dealt with Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, etc. quite a bit and messed around with this kind of setup. Thanks for the advice.

Josh

[JZ]

You could not make those changes unless you had root access, thus the need for approval or a dedicated server. I don't know if there is any way to update cpanel remotely. I assume not since the option to create a key is not there like it is in whm. There are no plans for VPS at this time per a recent post in the suggestions forum. If it interests you, go to the suggestions forum and post about it. There have been a few interested clients, and if they see there is a market for it, they may consider it in the future.

- Justin