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I know this is 101 level stuff but I am a developer, and I'm admittedly bad at the name server element of my profession. I am trying to mask the domain so that instead of going to developerugly.tumblr.com it still shows www.developerugly.com... I currently have a URL record for both the developerugly.com and www.developerugly.com... I tried ur sing an A record to point at tumblr's IP, but it never worked correctly... The IP went to tumblr's default page, not mine... Please help!

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    Note that the IP for tumblr.com and for developerugly.tumblr.com are different, which did you use?
    – Stobor
    Aug 9, 2011 at 1:18
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    The tumblr-specific answer is at tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains, however the answer below answers the question for masked url-proxying for general servers.
    – Stobor
    Aug 9, 2011 at 1:21
  • @stobor... good point... the template that dnsimple provided was for tumblr in general... did you get this ip for developerugly.tumbler.com? 173.230.131.235?? Can I rely on this being a static address?? or will it change at tumblr's whim?
    – Rikon
    Aug 9, 2011 at 2:38
  • I feel like a dummy on server fault :(
    – Rikon
    Aug 9, 2011 at 2:38

1 Answer 1

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You need to setup a webserver that accepts requests for www.developerugly.com and proxies them to developerugly.tumblr.com. An Apache configuration for that might look like:

<NameVirtualHost *:80>
    Servername www.developerugly.com
    Servername developerugly.com

    ProxyPass / http://developerugly.tumblr.com/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://developerugly.tumblr.com/
</NameVirtualHost>

There's also many third-party services that'll do this for you; Google should provideth.

Finally, there's the distinct possibility that tumblr allows you to point custom domains at it, you just need to tell tumblr about the domain and what it's supposed to display. I don't use tumblr, so I can't tell you if that's possible or how it could be done.

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  • thanks, that's a much more thorough answer than I anticipated... I've added "url" records and as a result, if I go to www.developerugly.com, it just puts tumblr.developerugly in the url... I thought there was a way to create a masked url with the ns records.
    – Rikon
    Aug 9, 2011 at 2:12
  • No, because DNS knows nothing of URLs.
    – womble ♦
    Aug 9, 2011 at 2:19
  • fair enough... to add a bit more background, I went from MyDomain and transfered all my dns records to dnsimple. If myDomain had an option to forward while "masked", did they do it via the apache server described above or did they pull it off w/ NS records?
    – Rikon
    Aug 9, 2011 at 2:33
  • @Rikon all of the options I can think of require having a webserver of some kind, whether it's proxying the site to the user through its own URL like womble's answer, or hosting an otherwise empty site containing nothing but an <iframe> containing the real site or something similar. Like womble said, DNS knows nothing about what you do with the addresses, and if tumblr does not support configuring a custom virtualhost, a client asking their website for Host: www.developerugly.com is not going to get the answer you want them to get.
    – DerfK
    Aug 9, 2011 at 2:41
  • @DerfK, yeah, I wondered what exactly MyDomain.com was doing to pull off this affect. Thank you both for your explanations!
    – Rikon
    Aug 9, 2011 at 3:05

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