I was using wildcard for including all subdomains for a server_name as

server_name domain.com;

I just installed nginx 1.2.3, but this configuration no longer works and subdomains lead to nginx 404 page. Since I followed a standard procedure of installation via apt-get, I suspect something has been changed in new versions of nginx.

Now, I can only use wildcard for subdomains with

server_name domain.com *.domain.com;

Did I miss something or it is the nginx policy in new versions and forthcoming ones to discard subdomains without *.domain.com ?