[jivings]

I experienced this today when migrating away from GitBook and I thought I was going crazy.

I had changed the CNAME pointing to GitBook to my new service, and dig etc was reporting that it had propagated correctly. BUT the URL was still resolving to GitBook.

I was pulling my hair out and questioning my entire understanding of how DNS works.

From what I can tell Cloudflare "partners" can introduce redirect rules that are prioritized over our own Cloudflare DNS rules. This sounds completely insane to me, there's no way SaaS providers should be able to hijack control of DNS like this.

[jivings]

You can see this yourself by running a "dig" against help.leavemealone.app, the DNS resolution and where the domain actually routes to is different.

[bauruine]

The domains resolves to an IP announced by AS397273 (https://render.com/) the web server at this IP returns a 302 redirect to https://dinkydani.gitbook.io/leave-me-alone-help/. What exactly can I see here?

[jivings]

Try doing a curl on the domain that's returned by the CNAME and comparing it to a curl on the original URL. I agree it makes no sense so I don't blame you for assuming it's nonsense.

There's a redirect happening somewhere but it ain't from the web server listed on the DNS record.

[zupa-hu]

I agree with @aussiedude that I don't see anything suspicious.

Authorative A records:

# help.leavemealone.app

help.leavemealone.app. 60 IN CNAME help.leavemealone.com.

# help.leavemealone.com

help.leavemealone.com. 30 IN CNAME leavemealone.helpkit.so.

# leavemealone.helpkit.so

leavemealone.helpkit.so. 1799 IN CNAME helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.

# helpkit-ssr.onrender.com

helpkit-ssr.onrender.com. 300 IN CNAME helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.

# Authorative A records for helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net:

helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 300 IN A 216.24.57.3 helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 300 IN A 216.24.57.253

--

Indeed opening the page loads 216.24.57.3 where I get a HTTPS response with statusCode 302 that redirects to -> https://dinkydani.gitbook.io/leave-me-alone-help/

Seems to be what should happen?

ps - I'm stunned though to see 4 CNAMEs, especially with 60 and 30s TTLs

[aussiedude]

I was honestly confused for a bit, then realised that your site was redirecting to Gitbook.

;; ANSWER SECTION: help.leavemealone.app. 0 IN CNAME help.leavemealone.com.

help.leavemealone.com. 0 IN CNAME leavemealone.helpkit.so.

leavemealone.helpkit.so. 0 IN CNAME helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.

helpkit-ssr.onrender.com. 0 IN CNAME helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.

helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 0 IN A 216.24.57.3

helpkit-ssr.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 0 IN A 216.24.57.253

[jivings]

Yes. DNS shows it should be redirecting to leavemealone.helpkit.so but it actually redirects to dinkydani.gitbook.io

[bauruine]

help.leavemealone.com. is a CNAME to leavemealone.helpkit.so which again is a CNAME to helpkit-ssr.onrender.com. and so forth till you get the A records. Your browser then connects to that IP and there you get the 302 redirect. I'm still not sure what I should see here.

EDIT: This is a CNAME chain and although it's not recommended it's valid https://serverfault.com/a/309660

[jivings]

The A records that you've gotten to are unrelated to Gitbook and there are no 302 redirects on our side. As far as I understand it's some internal redirect happening in Cloudflare's network.

You can read more info here: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/dns-subdomain-no-longer-w...

[bauruine]

Thanks for the explanation. I still don't know exactly what's going on here. How do the DNS records look on the Cloudflare UI?