Background:

 

Typically when you open a non-existing domain name in a web-browser, you either get an error page, or you are redirected to some search web-site controlled by the web-browser company or possibly your ISP.

This of course happens all the time because of misspellings and bad links on web-sites.

Now you can take advantage of those failed requests (from any client configured to use your DNS server) by redirecting them to your web-server instead of giving this traffic to the browser companies.

This option redirects all recursive DNS requests for non-existing domain names to a server IP address which you control.

This gives you a unique opportunity to present your own custom search page, a domain sale offer, a marketing message, an intranet site, or anything else you can think of.

Important: This function redirects ALL DNS requests for non-existing domain names (it is impossible to determine if a DNS request comes from a browser or another type of application), so you may need to use the sub-option to limit this to names starting with 'www'.

And to prevent this from happening to your own domains, use the other sub-option to only redirect domains for which this server is not authoritative.

 

NOTE: Only requests which are for domain names confirmed non-existing (NXDOMAIN) will be redirected - not any other error type conditions.

Domain names where the first 4 name segments resemble an IP address (reverse and RBL/DNSBL record names) will never be redirected.