redirect to 404 wildcard subdomain

Question

I setup a wildcard A record on my domain registrar. Now if a user access a missing subdomain on my domain, they will be redirected to the homepage. Currently my initial setup was this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com$1 [R]
  DocumentRoot /var/www
  <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
  </Directory>
  # more below...
</VirtualHost>

Any wildcard subdomain or if my IP is entered via URL will redirect to the homepage. Can I do something about this that will redirect (HTTP redirect perhaps) the wildcard subdomains to 404 page instead of to homepage?

Answer 1

Try changing your rewrite rule to this; it should fire the Apache 404 error page:

RewriteRule .* - [R=404,L]

The error page can be set to a custom HTML or PHP page using the ErrorDocument directive. While HTML pages work nicely, a PHP script allows you to do a little more.

You can probably create a nice looking page on the wildcard domain, and do this instead: RewriteRule .* /domain-doesnt-exist.php [L] The page I mentioned above could send a 404 header in case you want search engines to ignore the page.