Wildcards or KeyWords???

[Kevin Darcy]

Steven wrote:

>Ok all so I have been digging the group for hours now and researching
>my bind books with no luck so I come to you all for some questions or
>advise on the matter at hand. Ok so I have been approached by one of
>the many directors at work to see about building our DNS infastruture
>to have the ability to take data from a browser and redirect it to a
>given portion of our website, i.e. "KeyWords". Now I have used
>wildcards in the past, but this one is beyond me due to the fact that
>their will be no domain attached to the incomming query. I know if I
>force a proxy to the browser this could in fact be done, but I would
>like to see if I could do this on the DNS side of the house. Like I
>said I have searched and searched on the matter with no results, this
>could be due to the nature of the search performed so if I have missed
>something simple please forgive me. If any of you have some good
>insight into this matter please please share.
>
I don't really understand your question. You want to "take data from a 
browser and redirect it to a given portion of our website". How is the 
browser generating that data? By submitting form data to a CGI script or 
something like that? But you also say "their [sic] will be no domain 
attached to the incomming [sic] query". If it's a form submit, then 
there's some sort of URL to which the form data is being submitted, and 
presumably there is a DNS name in that URL. More generally, in order for 
the browser to get to the webserver, it's either got to, ultimately, use 
a DNS name or an IP address literal, and I assume you're not talking 
about the latter.

So, what exactly do you hope to accomplish with DNS here? Do you expect 
the browser to somehow know that it should access the webserver with 
different names depending on what data it is submitting to it? I suppose 
you could write some sort of applet or something to do that locally 
within the browser, but you'd end up having to configure all of that 
stuff in both DNS (using specific names or a wildcard) and the webserver 
configuration (again, with specific names, or a default). Seems to me 
like you're better off just writing the CGI or whatever server-side code 
you're using, to make sense of the data from the browser without having 
to get DNS and/or the webserver config involved in the process.

                                                                         
                                       - Kevin