Creating Wildcard Records in DNS Forwarder/Resolver

A wildcard DNS record resolves anything.example.com to a single IP, which can be useful in certain cases.

DNS Forwarder (dnsmasq)

A wildcard entry may be created in the DNS Forwarder by using the advanced options box, and an entry like so:

address=/example.com/192.168.1.54

That would make any host under example.com resolve to 192.168.1.54 (www.example.com, thissitedoesnotexist.example.com, mystuff.example.com, and so on).

If a specific Host Overrides is set for example:

specific.example.com 192.168.1.100
knownhost.example.com 192.168.1.101

Then those would be returned when doing a query for those hosts, only when no specific host has been specified in the host overrides would the advanced wildcard entry be used.

To resolve the domain to an IP address:

example.com 192.168.1.45

Leave the host field blank in the host overrides. So if the query is now for example.com, 192.168.1.45 would be returned. If knownhost.example.com was queried for then 192.168.1.101 would be returned.

If a blank hostname example.com host override entry has not been created, then a query for example.com would return the wildcard IP address set in the advanced option.

If madeupname.example.com was queried, then since no specific host record for madeupname exists in the host overrides. The wildcard entry of 192.168.1.54 would be returned.

DNS Resolver (Unbound)

The same effect may be obtained in the DNS Resolver (Unbound) using its advanced options:

server:
local-zone: "example.com" redirect
local-data: "example.com 86400 IN A 192.168.1.54"