Google Domains Forwarding Glitch
Categories:
[coding]
Tags:
[learn-from-my-mistakes]
Check your A records in Google Domains. The "Manage My Website" feature adds http:// before IP addresses, flummoxing routing.
Over the weekend I spent a good 4 or 5 hours troubleshooting this one only to find it wasn't an Apache problem but a Google problem. Learned a lot, so that's cool, but thought I'd help out anyone else in case they run into the same thing.
Google Domains has a "Manage Website" pane where you used to be able to input the IP address of your server. Google would set up your DNS records to route traffic to the server, the server would look at what's being asked for, and serve the appropriate website.
The problem is that even if you type in just an IP address like 10.20.30.40, it's now automatically prepending http:// as though you always wanted to route to a new domain rather than a new host.
So instead of sending visitors to my server at 10.20.30.40 looking for ArtOfTheSmart.com, they're being routed to http://10.20.30.40 looking for 10.20.30.40. That's a big problem.
You can fix this by going into the DNS settings page and manually creating your own A record(s) with just the IP address without a protocol. This fixed it for me.
