ping or curl invalid domains redirects to local server on Linux - linux

Question

When I try to ping or retrieve an invalid domain, I get redirect to default domain on my local server.
ex:
trying to ping www.invaliddomainnameexample.com from my server s1.mylocaldomain.com
~: ping www.invaliddomainnameexample.com
PING www.invaliddomainnameexample.com.mylocaldomain.com (67.877.87.128) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from mylocaldomain.com (67.877.87.128): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.040 ms
64 bytes from mylocaldomain.com (67.877.87.128): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.039 ms
or using curl
~: curl -I www.invaliddomainnameexample.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:09:57 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 223
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=10
Location: http://mylocaldomain.com/
my resolve.conf
~: cat /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Answer 1

Could it be that your /etc/resolv.conf also contains a
search mylocaldomain.com
statement and there's an „*“ DNS A RR for your domain?
Because then the searchlist is applied, the * record matches, and voilà!
Try ping www.invaliddomainnameexample.com. with a dot appended to mark the domain name as a FQDN which prevents applying the searchlist.

Answer 2

It looks like the only way to fix this is to disallow unknown hosts to be processed by Http server. Though I did that only for local IPs
I use Nginx so the config would be
#list of server and local IPs
geo $local {
default 0;
34.56.23.0/21 1;
127.0.0.1/32 1;
}
#Deny access to any host other
server {
listen 80 default_server;
server_name _;
if ( $local = 1 ){
return 405;
}
rewrite ^(.*) http://mylocaldomain.com$1 permanent;
}