DNS failure for non www domain

bryanjhickey · February 14, 2022, 4:22am

I have updated my domain name (at Hover.com) 2 days ago to point to Netlify’s DNS but my APEX domain is not being resolved or is not consistent in redirecting traffic.

dns1.p03.nsone.net
dns2.p03.nsone.net
dns3.p03.nsone.net
dns4.p03.nsone.net

While the primary domain www.renegademma.com.au is working, the non www domain is not constantly redirecting to www.

Advice in the sites domain management console advised Check DNS configuration

I can ping Netlify DNS and www.renegademma.com.au fine. Pinging renegademma.com.au results in Unknown host.

netlify site name: zen-brown-377382.netlify.appgood
custom domain www.renegademma.com.au good
custom domain (redirects to primary): renegademma.com.au not good

coelmay · February 14, 2022, 4:33am

Hey @bryanjhickey

Are both domains listed as Custom domains for your site? e.g.

If so, can you try selecting the Renew certificate button under SSL/TLS Certificate (below Custom domains) to see if that fixes the issue.

bryanjhickey · February 14, 2022, 4:36am

Thanks for the quick response.

Only www.renegademma.com.au has the green Netlify DNS badge. renegademma.com.au has the warning icon and Check DNS configuration.

Both domains are listed in the SSL cert and I have recently tried to new the SSL also but as both are listed as HTTPS enabled, renewing may have done nothing.

coelmay · February 14, 2022, 4:57am

I can see no A records for renegademma.com.au though I can see them for www.renegademma.com.au so something is amiss, though I am at a loss to explain exactly where or what. A Support Engineer who can see the records may see something I am not.

bryanjhickey · February 14, 2022, 5:06am

Are the A handled by Netlify in the background? No A records are in present in my DNS Settings.

coelmay · February 14, 2022, 5:12am

That’s what the NETLIFY and NETLIFYv6 records are. There is no need to add other records unless you need to point a subdomain to another site/service.

Everything there looks correct.

bryanjhickey · February 14, 2022, 6:08am

What are the potential issues of manually naming the A records for renegademma.com.au with the A records from www.renegademma.com.au seeing as Netlify is not assigning them currently? Do the A records change from time to time?

coelmay · February 14, 2022, 6:27am

This is only part of it. As Netlify operates a global CDN, the node closest to visitor (or the IP of the network that person it connected to) will serve the site. These IPs will change too. If you look at the following

% dig www.renegademma.com.au A +noall +answer

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> www.renegademma.com.au A +noall +answer
;; global options: +cmd
www.renegademma.com.au.	20	IN	A	54.206.231.79
www.renegademma.com.au.	20	IN	A	54.206.202.192

the value 20 is the TTL. In 20 seconds, these records will change. And here is what they look like 20 seconds later…

% dig www.renegademma.com.au A +noall +answer

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> www.renegademma.com.au A +noall +answer
;; global options: +cmd
www.renegademma.com.au.	20	IN	A	54.253.175.63
www.renegademma.com.au.	20	IN	A	54.206.231.79

Check out [Support Guide] How are requests routed to the nearest Netlify CDN node? for more details on this.

So if you add a A record pointing to one of Netlify’s IPs, only that IP will serve the site regardless of where the visitor is. This is, to say the least, sub-optimal.

Thomas9822 · February 14, 2022, 10:18am

Thanks for sharing this information. It was useful.

bryanjhickey · February 14, 2022, 11:06am

Great info. Will dig into dig and learn more.

Do A records shouldn’t be set manually when we’re using Netlify DNS.

What’s the process for getting a *Software Engineer * to investigate why no a records are bring automatically assigned for my non www domain?

coelmay · February 14, 2022, 11:21am

Only if you are setting up a record to point to somewhere else. For instance, you might set up a backend service elsewhere that you want to access via api.renegademma.com.au. You would create the appropriate A/CNAME records in Netlify DNS for that subdomain to work.

I have flagged this for the Netlfiy Support team to look into.

luke · February 15, 2022, 6:58am

Hi, @bryanjhickey. There is an explanation for why the NETLIFY type DNS record for the apex domain (renegademma.com.au) was not working.

It appears that the original NETLIFY type DNS record that existed was deleted. Then an A record was created for that same domain name. Then a NETLIFY type record was created again … while the A record for the same name was present.

It is that last step where the failure occurred. The NETLIFY type record cannot be created if there is an A record for the same name (and there was).

We have an open issue to resolve this behavior and, in the meantime, our support team can manually fix the issue.

If this happens again in the future, there is a workflow to resolve it on your own:

Delete any conflicting A records for the NETLIFY type records.
Delete any non-working NETLIFY type records.
Delete the custom domains for the non-working records from the site settings (under Site Name > Settings > Domain management > Custom domains).
Add the custom domain back to the site setting again (the same place where they were just deleted).

The key to the workflow above is that you are adding the custom domain to the site when there are no conflicting A records and the NETLIFY type records (just the non-working ones) have already been deleted. This recreates any missing NETLIFY records and, now that all conflicts are deleted, the newly created NETLIFY type record will work correctly.

I’ve tested to confirm it is working now. If there are any other questions, please let us know.

bryanjhickey · February 15, 2022, 7:11am

Excellent response Luke

I grew in understanding from this thread and the other posts which you have made about the roles of NETLIFY and NETLIFYv6 DNS records were clear and valuable!

I was coming to the opinion deleting the NETLIFY and NETLIFYv6 type records and custom domain may solve the issue but was hesitant to pull the trigger on deleting these on a live site!

Thanks mate.