Thomas Clowes's questions

I am using Apache, and would like to redirect all subdomain and non www addresses to the www version using Virtual Hosts.

The only exception to this rule is that I want media.domain.com to point to the same location as www.domain.com because I want a different, cookieless domain for images and video to be located on.. (speed).

The code below is not however working. How would one go about achieving this?

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName www.domain.com
        ServerAlias www.domain.com media.domain.com
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        DocumentRoot /srv/www/domain.com
</VirtualHost>



<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName domain.com
ServerAlias domain.com
    Redirect permanent / http://www.domain.com/
</VirtualHost>

So.. I have my live version of my site e.g v1.0 at domain.com

I then have my development testing version at testing.domain.com

I want testing.domain.com to only be accessible to me for testing, and as such I redirect all other IPs in my .htaccess file to the current live version at domain.com

Given this, do I need to have a robots.txt file on testing.domain.com to block search robots, or will the .htaccess redirect suffice?

Tiny extra little question.. should such a redirect be a 301 permanent redirect?

Thanks

So as a bit of background, I am completely new to server admin.

I am a web designer, and generally know quite a bit about computers.

Until a few months ago, I had never used LINUX.

Now my desktop runs Mint, and I have moved to an Ubuntu Linux cloud server with Rackspace.

Essentially I have followed the following guide: http://www.symana.com/2010/12/setup-a-lamp-rackspace-cloud-server-running-ubuntu-10-10/

to get to a point where I have apache, phpmyadmin etc. set up.

Given that I have set up the server thus far, and I appreciate this is massively unknowledgable.. but everyone has to start somewhere.., but can I now just use the server like i used my shared hosting account at hostgator?

I have bought myself a book about Ubuntu server administration such that I can essentially learn as I go..

The reason I have moved to rackspace is because i like the easily expandable nature of their cloud server offering which is exactly what i need for some of my growing websites. At the same time, I dont want to be prone to massive security breaches, inefficient loads, bad database connections etc. on the basis of me not knowing much about server admin.

Could anyone advise on my situation, the suitability of my setup, and how I could perhaps improve my setup..?

Cheers