Need to disable sub-subdomain in vHost or .htaccess

Question

Several of my clients created an "A" record to point a sub domain of their site to my server. E.g., http://subdomain.clientsite.com points to my IP address.

This works fine. However, if I manually insert a prefix such as "www" to make the URL look like "http://www.subdomain.clientsite.com" it resolves to my website instead of the client's site. I can add anything besides "www" as a prefix.

What is the best way to disable a "sub-subdomain"? It seems like it would be possible to do via the vHost file for each client or perhaps through an .htacess command. However, I don't know the best way to proceed.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Answer 1

Not sure why this problem occurs, though it is only for certain clients so it could depend on how a web host handles "A" records.

In any event, I added the following line to a vHost file for one of my clients:

ServerAlias subdomain.clientsite.tld *.subdomain.clientsite.tld

and it seemed to do the trick. Got the idea from this link: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/webservers/httpservers/doc/v1326/manual/vhosts/name-based.html

Answer 2

I can see how a client might have an A record of the form:

subdomain.example.com. 251 IN A 10.9.8.7

I don't see why www.subdomain.example.com automatically resolves to the same IP, unless you have a CNAME for each subdomain. But then you say that anything.subdomain.example.com behaves this way, so I don't understand what you have set up.

It is not uncommon to use a rewrite rule to redirect www.something.com to something.com - for example in Apache, you would do something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.something.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://something.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will have the effect of sending traffic from www.something.com to something.com, which is quite often done in the interests of search engine optimization.