Apache hosts; how to remove host name

The latter part of this post is wrong. I was under the impression, based on some stuff I had read on the web (if it's on the web, it must be true!) that part of the Windows DNS Server Service's tasks for creating its cache was to also load its host file into cache along with its local zone data. I searched around and couldn't find hard evidence of this. I tested the theory on my own Server 2008 R2 machine and found that the hosts file was not used to build the DNS Server's Cache.

However, I believe I have a slightly more elegant solution that Massimo. Instead of creating an authoritative zone for the entire nlscan.com zone, simply create a zone named mailserver.nlscan.com and place a nameless A record in that zone. The nameless A record will have the same name as the zone itself and you can give it the IP address that you want. All other domains underneath nlscan.com as well as nlscan.com itself will resolve by public DNS.

I just tested this out on my own Server 2008 R2 DNS server and was able to make my friend's website (nessus.nl) resolve via public DNS servers but the specific subdomain (blog.nessus.nl) resolve to an Apple.com IP address. Try it and see if it works for you.

Older, wrong post commences:

If my understanding is correct (EDIT: and it is not), when the DNS cache is built in the Server 2003 machine it pulls in entries from the hosts file as well as it's zone data. Placing 172.16.0.10 mailserver.nlscan.com in your Server 2003 machine's hosts file should solve the problem. Restart your DNS services after changing your hosts file.

Use ipconfig /displaydns on any Windows machine (specifically, your Server 2003 DNS machine) to see your host file entries. Also keep in mind that negative responses are cached in your clients so always run ipconfig /flushdns on the clients that you're experimenting with. Otherwise you'll end up abusing yourself against various hard objects as you wonder why your clients can't resolve a name you just entered into a zone / hosts file. =)

Have you tried this and failed?

The answer was in the /etc/hosts file. To discover IP addresses for names the systems DNS resolver will (should) first look to the /etc/hosts file for name=ip, if not there it goes on a DNS search. Read "man hosts" to see the syntax for the hosts file. Assign all of your domains (preferrably not FQDN) the ip # of your localhost (127.0.0.1) example:

127.0.0.1 localhost.exmaplesite1.com
127.0.0.1 localhost.exmaplesite2.com

Use the localhost.examplesite1.com and localhost.examplesite2.com as your ServerName in your VirtualHost directive. See the docs link for other settings and syntax. @Antonious use of a sole wildcard is not documented by Apache2 - but he did not understand I was trying to force certain names through a localhost loopback so that I could develop web applications offline. I never understood @lynxman's assumption that a "Bad Request" or "Server Not Found" error could write to the error logs to begin with - though I was using separate log files for each VirtualHost directive anyway.

BTW: "sudo host localhost.examplesite.com" will print out the IP address for the site IF 'examplesite.com' is an actual site. Apparently the "sudo host " command does NOT look for the /etc/hosts settings and influence on the IP. <-- yeah, I know, that screwed me over good.

cheers!