project / user based internal DNS setup

Question

I work for a studio that spends its days developing websites. There are often multiple people working on a project at once. I would like to be able to let people share what they are working on with the office in a standardized way.

I was thinking the url would work like this

project(.user_machine_name).dev

for example

qwikster.com.kevins-imac.dev

Is there a way I can setup an internal DNS server that can recognize the .dev extension, parse out the user and use that to reroute the request to their machine IP where apache is waiting to respond with the correct vhost setup?

Answer 1

You probably can't do it all with DNS, but it sure seems like it would be trivial to setup a .dev domain with a wildcard record that sends all traffic to an HTTP proxy that routes requests to the proper machine.

Answer 2

If your users receive their IP from DHCP, you could setup the DHCP server to create a dynamic DNS record to register each machine's name in a .dev domain.

Since I think you can't make DHCP create the wildcard records you need, maybe you can create wildcard-records that are CNAME aliasses which point to each user's dynamic-DNS record.