CNAME: does a cname change the url that the browser displays?

Question

I have a web site www.somewhere.com and I want the alias fr.somewhere.com.

I set up a CNAME record for www.somewhere.com alias fr.somewhere.com. When a user types in http://fr.somewhere.com in their browser, does the URL in the browser remain fr.somewhere.com or change to www.somewhere.com?

Answer 1

It will remain fr.somewhere.com by default but it will arrive at the server that handles somewhere.com requests. Inside there, in server's .htaccess, the %{HTTP_HOST} variable will contain fr.somewhere.com for such requests. You can base your resource mapping on that.

If you would want to rewrite it to somewhere.com, you can simply do it like this in .htaccess. as well.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =fr.somewhere.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.somewhere.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Note, that %{HTTP_HOST} will actually be fr.somewhere.com and if that condition matches, it will redirect (HTTP 301) to www.somewhere.com an append the path $1.

I have a CNAME record created for blog.legoservices.com which just points to tumblr, but all you see is blog.legoservices.com.