I have set up a reverse proxy in a similar manner to that described at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Multiple_Web_Servers and it is working well. I am redirecting external requests to distributed servers on a VPN based VLAN using the PPTP server on the same router as a hub. There are around 50 servers on the VLAN.
Because of the nature of the web application, each server on the VLAN can have several concurrent connections from the same client browser. To overcome the domain connection limit (of 2) imposed by many browsers, I use subdomains of the main url. The subdomains are solely to allow more than 2 connections per browser. The connections all go to the same server using the same port on the same IP.
As a part of the proxy exercise I made lots of entries in the static dns to steer the incoming requests by url to the appropriate server. In the static DNS for each server I need an entry for server-n.domain and an entry for each subdomain-x.server-n.domain. I found that the entry .server-n.domain (leading dot) as a wildcard responds for all subdomain-x requirements, but it does not respond for server-n.domain without a subdomain.
So to my question - is there any syntax for the name field in a single static DNS entry that will allow the address to be returned for both the server-n.domain and subdomain-x.server-n.domain variants? I ask because such a thing would allow me to halve the number of static dns entries (currently 140), and make administration a lot easier and safer.
Some other reverse proxies I have used do allow for this, some without requiring a separate DNS, but they dont seem to use a “standard” syntax.
TIA