DNS Wildcard

Today I was asked a new question – is it possible to add in a wildcard DNS entry so that *.subdomain.domain.com will respond to a ping.

I assumed that this would be possible.. and as expected it was after a little tweaking of the settings in DNS.

To set it up, I did the following:

Open the DNS console

Browse to “Forward lookup Zones” > domain.com

Right click > New Domain

In the box, put in the name of the subdomain

This creates something that looks like the following

I then went into the subdomain and created two A records – one with no name and one with * to point to the IP address I requested

However, when I opened up a command prompt and tried to ping anything.subdomain.domain.com it didn’t work.

The fix for this was to open the properties of the Forward Lookup zone “domain.com” and go to the WINS tab

I removed the tick from Use WINS forward lookup and victory – I could ping whateverIwanted.subdomain.domain.com