Someone else's domain pointing to my Linode?

Someone else's domain is pointing to my Linode
Why is this happening?

The short answer is: "Because someone is pointing the domain there." The longer answer might be better explained by reading over Linode's documentation pages on DNS Records. I also found and a pretty relevant Linode Community Post.

For this specific issue, I would recommend reading over the "Types of DNS Records" portion of this guide

As far as your specific case goes, you can verify that where a domain is pointing by running the following command:

dig <DOMAIN> +short

The output of this command will be the IP address that the domain is pointing to.

why is this even possible?

This is possible because theoretically anyone can point any domain to whatever IP they want.

If you don't own this domain and don't want whoever owns it to have it pointing to your IP address, there isn't a whole lot to worry about here. You would have to have your web server configured to accept those web requests. One step you could take to fix this would be to reach out to the registrar of the domain that is pointing to your Linode's IP.

You can find information on the registrar of this domain by running whois <domain> | grep -i registrar

Just as some extra information here, I also found a related serverfault article on this topic.

Is this something Linode would be able to correct for me?

Since these records are not part of the Linode infrastructure, there isn't really much they can do to help except provide you with the output of the commands I listed above.

Hope this helped answer your questions. Good luck on getting the issue resolved!

@mtcotton846 writes:

If you don't own this domain and don't want whoever owns it to have it pointing to your IP address, there isn't a whole lot to worry about here. You would have to have your web server configured to accept those web requests. One step you could take to fix this would be to reach out to the registrar of the domain that is pointing to your Linode's IP.

If I was in this situation & didn’t get any satisfaction from the owner’s registrar, I would configure my services to accept the domain name and then return some annoying error message on connection attempts.

Web surfers would get a custom error page with the number “404” in 72pt type.

ssh(1) would get “connection refused — domain squatting here” messages. Mail would get “connection refused — nobody here by that name” messages.

You could monitor logs to figure out when to turn all this off.

Alternatively, you could use fail2ban(1) to automatically ban service requests for that domain name (for like 30 days after a single request for service).

The domain owner would hear about this very quickly via customer/user complaints!

— sw

Great advice on this ticket, I would do the same as @stevewi.

Scott Hanselman (a Microsoft guy) recently found a site that was “hot linking” to his images and copying his blog’s content, so he configured his server to send a “this person has stolen my images and content” image in place of the real ones when it came from the domain in question!

https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1295958229848006657?s=21

Why is this happening, and why is this even possible?

Another explanation is simply the owner of that domain used a Linode but has since deleted it and not removed the IP from the domain, and you’ve since been allocated the same IP.

I’ve had several IPs allocated to me previously that are already on mailing server blacklists from previous owners.

@andysh writes:

Another explanation is simply the owner of that domain used a Linode but has since deleted it and not removed the IP from the domain, and you’ve since been allocated the same IP.

…or the domain owner copy/pasted the wrong IP address into the registrar's form.

-- sw