Moving from one dns domain to another

My Rails 2.1 app is changing DNS domains. For example:
From: www.oldcompany.com
To: www.newcompany.com
The app uses Apache2, mongrel_cluster, MySQL.
I would like the existing users who visit www.oldcompany.com URLs to be:

  1. Notified via an HTML page that the site has changed from oldcompany
    to new company and then redirect them to newcompany.
    This has to be done on the same server which gets new host name etc.

I know that it can be done with mod_rewrite, but I am not proficient
with it. Is there a rewrite rule that I can put into my httpd.conf file
that will detect the incoming URLs with oldcompany hostnames and
redirect them to a particular HTML page?
For some time, I can keep both the new and old DNS names pointed to the
same IP address.
Thanks.
Bharat

On 07 Oct 2008, at 15:35, Bharat R. wrote:

I know that it can be done with mod_rewrite, but I am not proficient
with it. Is there a rewrite rule that I can put into my httpd.conf
file
that will detect the incoming URLs with oldcompany hostnames and
redirect them to a particular HTML page?
For some time, I can keep both the new and old DNS names pointed to
the
same IP address.

From URL Rewriting for Beginners | Alone On A Hill

To redirect an old domain to a new domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} old_domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new_domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

As always, thanks Peter.
Regards,
Bharat

Thanks Freddy,
This was very helpful too.
Regards,
Bharat

Hi,

If you want the customer to land on a landing page that redirects
after 5/10 seconds you should just setup two virtualhosts in apache
one for the new domain and one for the old…

The old domain has one index.html file inside the doc root which has a
META refresh inside. example:

New Site Name The contents you are looking for have moved. You will be redirected to the new location automatically in 5 seconds. Please bookmark the correct page at www.newsite.com

That will give a landing page for the old site that redirects to the
new site after 5 seconds…