Weberns Hideout

Tired of setting up small web hotels just so you can redirect domains to another url? Well, so was I.
Luckily we’re using PowerDNS which supports URL-type record. What it basically do, is telling your PowerDNS nameserver that you have a fancy record it should do something with.

Let’s get started:

• First of all, you should enable fancy records in PowerDNS. Open up pdns.conf and paste this:

  fancy-records=yes

• Then, you should tell it where your redirector-service is, replace 192.168.1.1 with your publically accessible redirector-service:

  urlredirector=192.168.1.1

• Next up is to enable your webserver to redirect the requests. First, add a new virtual site. How you do this varies between different distros I’ll leave that up to the reader. Here’s my current virtual host for it:

  <VirtualHost _default_:80>
  ServerAdmin hostmaster@localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/urlredirect
  ErrorLog logs/urlredirect-error_log
  CustomLog logs/urlredirect-access_log common
  </VirtualHost>

• Next, and finally, create a simple php-page that actually does the redirecting. It will connect to the MySQL-backend of PowerDNS, read the URL-record and redirect the user to that location.

  index.php
  <?php
  
  // Get the server name our user requested
  $servername = $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]; 
  
  // replace this with credentials to your powerdns database
  @mysql_connect('db-host','username','password');
  // replace this with the right database name
  @mysql_select_db('powerdns');
  $result = @mysql_query("SELECT content FROM records WHERE name = '$servername' AND type = 'URL' LIMIT 1");
  // Query for our redirection
  if (mysql_num_rows($result) == 1) {
  // we got a result, redirect to that
  $row = @mysql_fetch_object($result);
  header("Location: $row->content");
  } else {
  // we didn't get any result for unknown reason, redirect to failsafe place
  header("Location: http://www.google.com");
  }
  ?>

• This should be it! If you’re really brave you could also add a rewrite rule to make sure all requests get redirect, not only those to somedomain.com/