My company operates an online service which provides Web page building functions.
Now we wants to add new feature giving different subdomains to the
members' web pages.
Because the number of members is about 120,000, manual configuring is
not the solution.

Let me give you an example.
1) We have domain name such as '123.com'.
2) Someone joined 123.com with account 'abcd'.
3) He get his own direcory in our Web server such as /htdocs/members/abcd/.
   (It's url become 'http://www.123.com/members/abcd' 
    and we currently redirect 'http://www.123.com/abcd' to this url.)

4) And he should get the subdomain 'abcd.member.123.com'. (How can we
implement this???)

About our service environment : Solaris, Oracle, Apache, Tomcat, Java, php, ...

I want to know how to implement generating subdomains automatically.
If any source codes are available, that will be helpful.

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Clarification of Question by lifeproducer-ga on 28 Apr 2004 20:30 PDT

Thank you, gouravjain and okrogius.

I think that adding each entries for our members in httpd.conf makes
httpd.conf too heavy and degrade the performance of Web server.

By the way, I found interesting page that would be helpful.
 "Dynamically configured mass virtual hosting"
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/vhosts/mass.html 

I am thinking about how to implement this method to our Web server.

Hi lifeproducer,

Basically your soultion is to have virtual domains, you need to create
one virtual domain for each of your user in your apache conf file
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

This virtual domain will point the request of 'abcd.member.123.com' to
'http://www.123.com/members/abcd'.

You can add the following line in your httpd.conf file to make a virtual domain.

<VirtualHost www.123.com>
ServerAdmin webmaster@abcd.123.com
DocumentRoot /www/docs/abcd.123.com
ServerName abcd.123.com
ErrorLog logs/abcd.123.com-error_log
TransferLog logs/abcd.123.com-access_log
</VirtualHost> 

You can write script in perl or some other language to add the
following entry for all the users you have. If you need the help in
that then please do write to me.

Gourav Jain

Alternatively there is one opther option which may be easier to
implement under apache (assuming that since you brought up /htdocs/) -
wildcard subdomains. You can add:


ServerAlias *.example.com

In your virtual section of your apache configuration file. Then if
someone goes to 116354654653136496841351.example.com they just get
your default page, rather then a 404.

Finally, make your default page dynamic (PHP or ASP would do fine) to
check the domain the page is being accessed under. If the domain isn't
wwww.example.com or the like, the page can instantly redirect them to
the user's page.

For an example of this try yaxay.com. You can go to [member].yaxay.com
and get a user's profile page (e.g. test.yaxay.com).