My client has some A records of subdomains for his website that I would like to remove if not in use.
However when I click on them they show an index page - see attachment.
Is this automatically created if I have an A record?
Where are these files sitting?
When I click on cgi-bin/ I get a 403 error.
What does this mean - does he have them on a hosting platform somewhere?
What happens if I remove the A record?
What feature, service or problem is this related to?
Either yes, either on the same server, but separate directory and using specific vhost file at Web server to serve files from particular directory when requested blessing sub-domain.
Is using Cloudflare nameservers. If you manage this domain, under the DNS tab of Cloudflare dashboard you’d either see A blessing or CNAME blessing pointed to some IP address.
Both wiki and blessing can be pointing to the same or different IP addresses.
If you can get access to the hosting of those, you can easily remove the content from the cPanel or web hosting, and see if it the content does change.
Otherwise, if not in use, remove the particular DNS records, yes so it won’t be available to public Internet, despite it still might exist at the web hosting.
I’d consider asking twice my client just to confirm what they really want about it.
Shouldn’t be available and Cloudflare doesn’t create them.
Check your DNS records at hosting (if you can); otherwise check DNS tab of Cloudflare dashboard if you’re using wildcard * record. I’d advise to remove it and add only sub-domains which are in-use and active to remove any issues and lower the possibilites of getting attacked, hacked or vulnerabillities found out (if any).
If the content under such sub-domain isn’t related, or even old, might not be worth keeping them.
I’d suggest checking the Security → Events, if there are some strange requests being blocked on those sub-domains (you could add a Filter for them to exclude it from any other events). If they appear, determine how frequent and if it’s worth keeping them or just removing to remove any possible headache in future.
