Help with DNS issue - webhost and management co blaming eachother

Technology Devops
#1

We have provided 45 websites through a developer for our parishes. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the developer stood up a new server and moved all of the parish websites. This required changing A-records for all 45 websites. I am having problems with 1 of the 45.

I don’t manage the DNS for the one problem website, a local service provider does. I do manage DNS for the 44 other parish sites and they made it through the move successfully.

Here is the problem which did not exist before the move:

If you visit the site by typing only the domain name, stmarkmtcalvary.church, the sub-menu items work but all of the new browsers are calling the website unsafe.

If you visit the site by using the full URL, https://www.stmarkmtcalvary.church, the website loads but sub-menu items do not work.

The developer said to ask the managed service provider to ensure there are 2 A-Records both pointing to the IP. One should have a host of @ and the other should have a host of www.

The service provider says the have looked at the problem and they are not the cause. They said they only need to create 1 A-record but won’t tell me which one. He said something about only the webhost would need an A-record using @ not them so I assume that’s the one they won’t create.

  • The service provider sent me a screen shot from Free DNS checker which he says proves they are not the problem.

  • The web host/developer says they aren’t the problem either.

I don’t know enough to figure out where the problem lies. Is there a security reason why they wouldn’t want to create two A-records?

#2

From the look of it they have an A record on the base domain and a cname on www pointed to the base domain. This is perfectly fine and should work exactly the same as two A records. Clicking through the site I get 404 errors on any pages in the menu meaning your server is erroring out. I hate to break the “it is always DNS” rule, but that doesn’t seem like DNS to me.

Chris

#3

Yeah; looking at things this looks like pretty lazy web “development” to me. LinkChecker reports 28/46 links on the home page to be 404’s. That’s nothing to do with DNS.

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#4

Looks like there may be a problem with the https configuration. The site works if you use http but not if you use https. Might be redirects or proxy settings in the config that need fixing.

#5

The broken links are a symptom of the problem not the result of lazy development. Those links weren’t broken until the problem started.

#6

Having managed too many web servers in the past, this looks strongly like an issue with the new server’s Apache configuration.

If it were my website, I would first start looking at the Apache logs, and very likely it will point you to the ssl and/or redirect configuration of the site.

Both stmarkmtcalvary.church and www.stmarkmtcalvary.church work fine on http but not https, and DNS A records and CNAME records are protocol agnostic, so I don’t see how this could be a DNS issue.

There’s a chance that the https portion of the site’s redirect rules might be in a config block somewhere that only applies to the old IP address, or possibly the new server’s redirect rules were only added to the http path.

With all that said: If you let your service provider know that while you agree their method should work fine, it is important to you that they use both A-Records in order to satisfy the developer so they will continue troubleshooting, they will likely make the change.

All of our domains have www as a CNAME record aliasing to the base domain, which is either an A-record or ANAME depending on the web host.

I’d love to hear how this ends out. Server migrations are always nerve-racking and I hate you’re having to manage this without direct access to either system.