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I bought the domain name shorlines.com for a client of mine, and I set it up on my test server and all is well. However when I visit www.shorlines.com it redirects to a bad link some sort of cached error page. I've done a whois on www.shorlines.com and received a blank response due to it not being registered. The WHOIS for shorelines.com returned back the information I expected.

I first did a ping of www.shorlines.com to see if the server would respond and to get the IP address. Heres the results

Jonathans-MacBook-Pro:~ jonathanstowe$ ping www.shorlines.com
PING shorelines.com (216.116.229.137): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3
Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
Request timeout for icmp_seq 5
^C
--- shorelines.com ping statistics ---
7 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss

I then ran a dig a www.shorlines.com and got these results

Jonathans-MacBook-Pro:~ jonathanstowe$ dig a www.shorlines.com

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> a www.shorlines.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 35018
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.shorlines.com.     IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.shorlines.com.  699 IN  CNAME   shorelines.com.
shorelines.com.     99  IN  A   216.116.229.137

;; Query time: 35 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Jun 25 21:27:00 2017
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 76

Which shows it directs to shorelines.com but has an error. When visiting shorelines.com it redirects to jacksonville.com a news site for Florida.

The issue is I have no idea how to override that DNS entry to point to my domain because I know a lot of users still use the www. prefix. If this isn't the correct Overflow site, I can post in whichever one is the correct.

hightekjonathan
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1 Answers1

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First of all, whois contains information only on the master domains, so whois www.somedomain.com shouldn't return any information.

When looking up A records for shorlines.com, www.shorlines.com, shorelines.com and www.shorelines.com, the results are as follows:

  • shorlines.com has the IP address: 74.98.168.53
  • shorelines.com has the IP address: 216.116.229.137
  • www.shorlines.com and www.shorelines.com are CNAMEs for shorelines.com

You need to know which IP address your web server has, and assign it to all domains you want to use.

Then, you need to make sure your web server has all these domains configured in its configuration, so that requests will reach the proper virtual host in it.

Tero Kilkanen
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  • The IP for my server is 74.98.168.53 which is what shorlines.com displays. I do not own shorelines.com however. So how can I get www.shorlines.com CNAME to point to my server instead of whoever owns the other? – hightekjonathan Jun 26 '17 at 02:21
  • You go to your domain registrar or DNS service control panel and fix the CNAME entry there. – Tero Kilkanen Jun 26 '17 at 02:25
  • I see the typo in there now. I don't even remember setting the wildcard CNAME, but it's propagating now. Thank you for pointing out my error! – hightekjonathan Jun 26 '17 at 02:27