[OT] Is it possible to set a ddns hostname to access a name-based virtual host?

[Michael Milligan]

This is actually off topic for BIND-users...

hongyi.zhao at gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, February 20, 2009 at 19:51, serge.fonville at gmail.com wrote:
>> Hi,
> 
>> Is it possible to set a ddns hostname, say through
>> http://www.changeip.net/ , without using *some_domain* itself, to 
>> access this file? 
> 
>> Not entirely sure what you are actually trying to achieve.
>> Could you provide a concrete example of the situations you are trying to achieve?
> 
> Let me give an example to illustrate my problem:
> 
> In the following url, the prola.aps.org is a name-based  virtual host:
> 
> http://prola.aps.org/pdf/PRB/v1/i1/p1_1
> 
> On  the other hand, my institute has subscribed to prola and many other
> journals, so I want to use some self-made and easy-to-memory hostnames for
> each  of them.  For example, I want to use the following url to access
> the above one:
> 
> http://myprola.myddns.org/pdf/PRB/v1/i1/p1_1

I fail to see how the later is more "easy-to-memory" than the former, but...

> 
> Is this possible?
> 

Generally, no.  Virtual hosting involves setting, in almost all cases, a
unique document root for each virtual host.  If you reference a file or
location via a URI that uses a different hostname, then it either
matches a different virtual host, or matches the default virtual host,
but in either case the document root is almost certainly different, and
thus the relative path (/pdf/PRB/v1/i1/P1_1 in your case) almost certain
does not translate to the correct absolute path to get the right file or
get you to the right generator, whatever the location references and/or
triggers to send back content.

You *must* reference the location using the same URI if you expect to
see the same expected results.

Regards,
Mike

PS:  There are other maintenance problems with your approach too, but
you avoid those by just not even trying to do what you asked.

-- 
Michael Milligan                                   -> milli at acmeps.com