Wildcard DNS and NT4

[Bob Duncan]

Greetings,

We are currently providing remote users access to Web databases using 
Innovative Interfaces' WAM product.  The latest iteration of the product 
offers a rewrite proxy method based on EZProxy.  In order for the proxy to 
work, a wildcard DNS entry of *.www.library.lafayette.edu is required so 
that (e.g.) blah.www.library.lafayette.edu will resolve to the IP address 
associated with www.library.lafayette.edu. Our campus computing folks have 
been able to create the wildcard DNS entry on their NT4 server, but they 
can't seem to make it function as required:  when one checks variations of 
the real hostname with nslookup the server returns an authoritative reply 
but no address.  And instead of being treated as a wildcard, the asterisk 
is seen as a literal character if *.www is looked up (that is, the literal 
string *.www.library.lafayette.edu resolves to the IP address of 
www.library.lafayette.edu).

I have read EZProxy's and III's suggestions for creating wildcard entries 
in WinNT, but nothing has helped.

The DNS servers are NT4.0 with service pack 6a.  If anyone has any 
experience making this work on similarly-configured machines, I would 
appreciate hearing from you.

Thanks,

Bob Duncan


~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
David Bishop Skillman Library
Lafayette College
Easton, PA  18042
duncanr at lafayette.edu
http://www.library.lafayette.edu/