Why is Apache redirecting all domains without a .conf file to one particular domain?

Question

My company has a LAMP server, and I am not an expert at web hosting but I manage basic tasks.

My server currently hosts about twelve different domains. Each domain has a .conf file in the sites-enabled directory, and they work fine. Let's say we have example1.com, example2.com, and example3.com, just to hopefully help explain this question.

Recently, a person I work with registered a bunch of new domains. With the domain registrar, they pointed the domains to our IP address. I believe this is called "parking" a domain. I have not set up a .conf file or enabled any of these new domains on our server yet. Let's say they are newsite1.com, newsite2.com, etc...

What's puzzling to me is that if one types one of the new domains into a browser, one of our existing domain shows up. Let's say it's example1.com. So, if you go to a browser and type in newsite1.com, or newsite2.com, you are taken to example1.com. Also, in the address bar at the top of the browser, it will be displayed as example1.com.

This is not the desired behaviour. For one thing, we did not choose, as far as I know, for example1.com to be the default, and it's not necessarily the website we would want to be the default. In any case, I don't know why the system is going to example1.com as opposed to example2.com or any of our other sites.

The desired behaviour would be for there to just be a general error, "this domain does not exist" or something like that. If there has to be a default website, we'd like to be able to choose it.

I've seen questions on Stack Oveflow that are similar, but they all presume one wants to set a default. When I look at the configuration files they reference, for example /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, they are empty, so in my case, there is nothing to unset.

How do I stop browsers from being redirected to the website that they are currently being directed to? How can I set it so that Apache just returns a "site not found" error instead of serving up a website?

Answer 1

I suppose you're using name based virtual hosts and the <VirtualHost> directive and this is what docs have to say:

If no matching name-based virtual host is found, then the first listed virtual host that matched the IP address will be used. As a consequence, the first listed virtual host for a given IP address and port combination is the default virtual host for that IP and port combination.

So when you say:

I've seen questions on Stack Oveflow that are similar, but they all presume one wants to set a default.

... all I can add is that that's the way Apache works. I don't think it's inherently wrong to have a default host that serves a this domain does not exist page. I always do so in my Windows development box, typically by commenting out the default hosts at conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf file and adding my default host there.

If you ask for my opinion, it's rather questionable that Apache basically serves an arbitrary site when there's no match, thus making this customisation mandatory—and I've seen lots of live sites that don't do it.

Answer 2

The easiest way to fix this is name your .conf files starting with a number.

If you look at the default apache configs, you'll notice a file called "000-default.conf". Apache will load the files in number order - so just make your default virtual host .conf file be 000-whatever.conf.