I'm going to share the responses I received from both Linode and Digital Ocean as I believe they might be useful to someone at some point:
Linode
I believe the issue you're seeing is due to you not have a DNS zone
for your second level domain. As far as I can see you need to create a
new zone for accounts.example.com.ng, you will need to create NS
records on the example.com.ng zone that point to ns1.linode.com -
ns5.linode.com.
Once this has been accomplished you can make a CNAME for the wildcard,
pointing to where you intend to point it. You will then want to make
an A record for "accounts.example.com.ng" (the hostname field would be
blank), which points to any IP address of your choice (even
127.0.0.1).
I hope this helps!
Digital Ocean
I see that you've added the wildcard record to your DNS settings here
and it looks correct; however, if the apex domain (example.com.ng) DNS
is served by Linode's nameservers, you should add the record there
rather than creating a separate DNS zone file here at DigitalOcean. If
there are any configuration issues, their Support team can see the DNS
records that you're trying to create and would be better able to help.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Second entry (different staff):
Thanks for taking the time to write in today. This level of DNS
service is very much possible. The problem you are facing is that you
simply added an A record when you created accounts.example.com.ng. And
the *.accounts.example.com.ng record requires an actual subdomain
delegation to work. Subdomains require name server records to point to
a new server for delegation. If you ran a nameserver on
accounts.example.com.ng and delegated the entire zone to that server,
then you can have accounts.example.com.ng host
*.accounts..example.com.ng.
It would look something similar to this:
ns1.linode.com (authoratative server) - example.com.ng
|
-----> ns1.accounts.example.com.ng (authoratative server) - accounts.example.com.ng (DigitalOcean Droplet) |
-----> ns1.accounts.example.com.ng A 1.1.2.2
-----> *.accounts.example.com.ng A 1.1.2.2
You could also try testing a double wild card record. It would look
similar to this:
*.*.example.com.ng A 1.1.2.2
To help better understand wildcard DNS records, I would recommend
reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcard_DNS_record and for a
more indepth perspective of the subject please read
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4592
Please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.
Best, Mike DigitalOcean Support Check out our community for great
tutorials, articles and FAQs! https://digitalocean.com/community
I'm going to analyze this and attempt the suggested solutions. I'll update this post with whatever works!
Update:
After exchanging a few messages with Linode support, I was able to configure DNS correctly.
This was the reply that helped:
The only way to do this would be to have accounts.example.com.ng set as
a separate zone and then within that zone create the A record to the
IP that accounts.example.com.ng is currently set to and then set
*.accounts.example.com.ng within that zone to the IP you need.