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Issues with subdomain not working (but works when I hardcode the ip in hosts file)

Posted on March 11, 2015

I’m trying to point a subdomain to my droplet running a nginx server. Somewhere along the way I’ve done something wrong and when I try to go to my subdomain I get “Gateway Timeout: can’t connect to remote host.”

I’m pretty sure it’s an issue with the DNS because when I add my subdomain to my hosts file and point it to my droplet’s ip address everything works great.

The following is my zone file on DO:

$ORIGIN blog.bookroo.com.
$TTL 1800
blog.bookroo.com. IN SOA ns1.digitalocean.com. hostmaster.blog.bookroo.com. 1423974942 10800 3600 604800 1800
blog.bookroo.com. 1800 IN NS ns1.digitalocean.com.
blog.bookroo.com. 1800 IN NS ns2.digitalocean.com.
blog.bookroo.com. 1800 IN NS ns3.digitalocean.com.
blog.bookroo.com. 1800 IN A 104.236.83.209

The domain is managed by NameSilo and I have the following settings:

      A	          107.161.23.204	        NA	172816	www re-direct 		
      A	          107.191.99.114	        NA	172816	www re-direct 		
      A	          142.4.203.239	        NA	172816	www re-direct 		
blog	  CNAME	  ns1.digitalocean.com	NA	172817	3rd-party		
www     CNAME	  lb.cratejoy.com	        NA	172816	3rd-party		

Can anyone see what I’m doing wrong? Thanks in advance!



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Isn’t the ip address dependent on the droplet? i.e. if I created a new droplet and wanted to use that I’d have to modify my hosting DNS again rather than just the DO side.

I understand why the new system would work, but can you explain why the old system wasn’t working?

Delete the zone from DO. On namesilo, delete the CNAME record for blog. Create an A record for blog to 104.236.83.209.

Don’t over-complicate things, and I highly recommend learning more about how DNS works.

Ok cool. Thanks a lot for your help!

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