From time to time it can happen that websites that used to be on your webservers are being moved by your clients without notifying you. Therefore, you will have to search for «zombie websites».

I have the following setup: There is an Apache webserver that has a lot of websites. Each website has at least two Virtual Hosts, a first for the main website and a second one fetching all the aliases and redirecting them to the first. Each website has its own config file.

So, if I want to know whether a website is still being served by my machine, I run the following:

for host in `grep "Server\(Alias\|Name\)" _config/apache/*
| awk '{ for(i=3 ; i<=NF ; i++)printf "%s\n", $i}'`; do echo
 -n `nslookup "$host" | grep -A1 Name | grep Address | awk
'{print $2}'`; echo " $host"; done

Okay, let’s go through it step by step:

for host in `grep “Server\(Alias\|Name\)” _config/apache/*

Here we extract all lines containing ServerAlias or ServerName in all config files.  The output will look like

_config/apache/foo.bar.conf: ServerName www.foo.bar

 _config/apache/foo.bar.conf: ServerAlias foo.bar fuh.bar www.foo.bar
_config/apache/example.com.conf: ServerName www.example.com
_config/apache/yah.conf: ServerAlias    example.com

As we can see, the results have a varying size. Therefore, we have to tell awk about it.

| awk ‘{ for(i=3 ; i<=NF ; i++)printf “%s\n”, $i}’`

Awk takes each line and starts to read it from the third column (each seperated with a space) until EOL. What we get is being printed with a CRLF so that we do not get example.com fuh.bar www.foo.bar but

example.com
fuh.bar
www.foo.bar

do echo -n

Now we print each of the results of the following command without a CRLF afterwards.

`nslookup “$host” | grep -A1 Name | grep Address | awk ‘{print $2}’`;

Here we perform a IP lookup of the current host, grep for a string called “Name” and let it print the following line as well as it contains the IP address we are looking for. As we just need the IP address, we do another grep on the result and pick the second line. But we don’t want the “Address” string here, so we awk it away. To make it a little bit easier to understand, I will quickly show you what these commands do:

nslookup example.com
Server:         213.133.100.100
Address:        213.133.100.100#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   example.com
Address: 192.0.32.10
---
nslookup example.com | grep -A1 Name
Name:   example.com
Address: 192.0.32.10

---

nslookup example.com | grep -A1 Name | grep Address
Address: 192.0.32.10

---

nslookup example.com | grep -A1 Name | grep Address | awk '{print $2}'

192.0.32.10

echo ” $host”

Now we have an IP but we would like to know what the corresponding hostname is, so we quickly echo it.

Done. Afterwards we can see:

192.0.32.10 www.example.com

yetanotherhost.mil