Editing aliases.conf (a.k.a. mapping new domains)

Thanks to the great Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding fame—dear friend, code guru, and the guy who invented the internet for me—I have a step-by-step guide for editing the aliases.conf file in order to enable domains pointed at UMW Blogs’ IP address to actually be mapped to the appropriate domain. Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin makes the actually pointing of the domain extremely easy, but we made it that you now need to manually added new alias to the aliases.conf file as a mechanism to keep track of mapped domains. It’s relatively simple, but I lost the directions recently, so wanted to post them here for safe keeping. Especially since the demand for mapping domains on UWM Blogs has exponentially increased this last year. We are pushing 200 mapped domains on UMW Blogs, which I think is truly remarkable

Anyway, here is how to add an alias on umwblogs, thinking this may help someone out there as wel. As long as you remember where our aliases.conf file may not be where your is.

1. Shell in as root:

ssh root@thenameofyourserver.com

2. Edit the apache inlcude file where they are stored using nano:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/userdata/std/2/umwblogs/umwblogs.org/aliases.conf

3. Press ctrl + v a few times to scroll down to the bottom.

4. Add the server alias line. Be sure to include the www. Without dynamic subdomains, it looks like this:

ServerAlias jamesfarmer.umw.edu www.jamesfarmer.umw.edu

With dynamic subdomains, it looks like this:

ServerAlias jamesfarmer.umw.edu *.jamesfarmer.umw.edu

5. Press ctrl + o to save the file and ctrl + x to exit nano.

6. Verify apache conf file to make sure you didn’t introduce an error.

apachectl configtest

7. If you have an error, you need to fix it. Otherwise, restart apache:

/sbin/service httpd restart

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2 Responses to Editing aliases.conf (a.k.a. mapping new domains)

  1. Andrea_R says:

    Even better – if you know you;re mapping a lot of domains, and are the only site on the box (or one of a few you have control over), you can make your WP install the default account and put in a wildcard named host.

    this totally eliminates the ServerAlis line for every single mapped domain. When you get upwards of 200, it could slow things down.

    the serveralias is also the same thing as parking in the directions.

  2. Reverend says:

    Andrea,

    Originally that is how this box was setup, but once we allowed http://teachumw.org/ to run email mailing list on the server, we had to start tracking manually domains to the server via this service. An amazing addition, but still a mighty overhead.

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