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I seem to be the unlucky recipient of a 302 redirect from the blogoverflow site, and was asked by Grace Note to upload the issue here. While trying to access the DIY blog site, I'm getting bounced over to the generic SE blog page. I've tried resolving this by changing DNS servers, clearing my browser cache, and trying a different browser. Others going to the same site aren't experiencing the issue, but I'm at a loss for what's different on my system that would cause this. Here's the wget output of the redirect:

--2014-02-18 14:59:28--  http://diy.blogoverflow.com/
Resolving diy.blogoverflow.com (diy.blogoverflow.com)... 67.228.172.87
Connecting to diy.blogoverflow.com (diy.blogoverflow.com)|67.228.172.87|:80... c
onnected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 19:59:28 GMT
  Server: Apache
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.22
  Location: http://stackexchange.com/blogs
  Content-Length: 1001
  Connection: close
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://stackexchange.com/blogs [following]
--2014-02-18 14:59:28--  http://stackexchange.com/blogs
Resolving stackexchange.com (stackexchange.com)... 198.252.206.140
Connecting to stackexchange.com (stackexchange.com)|198.252.206.140|:80... conne
cted.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Cache-Control: private
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
  Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 19:59:28 GMT
  Content-Length: 16775
Length: 16775 (16K) [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html.1’

     0K .......... ......                                     100% 1.04M=0.02s
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19
  • We're having this issue for the English blog as well (me and at least one other user) and the blog login page is a 404. Oh, it is 404 because it remaps to stackexchange.com/blogs/wp-admin.
    – Kit Z. Fox
    Feb 18, 2014 at 22:46
  • And me: of the blogs listed on stackexchange.com/blogs, only Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault and Gaming are working. Could it be some difference between sites with URLs of the form topic.stackexchange.com and sitetitle.com, perhaps?
    – alexwlchan
    Feb 19, 2014 at 0:58
  • Which DNS server are you using? There was a temporary problem earlier today with errant 302s but that should have persisted an hour maximum.
    – Nick Craver
    Feb 19, 2014 at 1:13
  • @Nick My default is dns-cac-lb-01.rr.com. If I switch to 8.8.8.8, it works fine. Switch it back to default, and it's 302.
    – Kit Z. Fox
    Feb 19, 2014 at 1:56
  • @KitFox what TTL do you get from your normal DNS server?
    – Nick Craver
    Feb 19, 2014 at 1:56
  • @NickCraver what IP should it be resolving to for blogoverflow.com? I'm getting 67.228.172.83 for blogoverflow.com and .87 for bicycles.blogoverflow.com, which redirects about 70% of the time.
    – nhinkle
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:09
  • @NickCraver also even when I do a DNS cache flush I'm still getting the 67.228 address.
    – nhinkle
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:10
  • @Nick I'm not sure. I'm on my work computer and I'm confused by what I'm seeing on nslookup. The longest 'default ttl' is 1 day, the shortest ttl is 5 min, and the only one that seems to be changing is right close to 2 hours.
    – Kit Z. Fox
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:14
  • @KitFox it looks like some DNS servers have erroneously cached a 5min to 1 hour TTL for 24 hours, there's not much we can do there besides ride it out.
    – Nick Craver
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:20
  • @NickCraver what's the difference between what's being served up by the different IP? Can the configuration on the server behind the "old" IPs be changed? I'm curious how we ended up with a sometimes-but-not-always 302 redirect in the first place.
    – nhinkle
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:21
  • @nhinkle 198.252.206.19 If you look at the SOA for blogoverflow.com you can see it's pointed at ns(1-4).serverfault.com, you can query those directly for the correct, current A record.
    – Nick Craver
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:21
  • @nhinkle It was erroneously pointed at the name.com servers for redirects for about an hour this morning. We're moving our 301/302 only domains (which someone thought this was, since the root blogoverflow.com is redirected) to name.com directly for the short-term in preparations to move DNS off our servers.
    – Nick Craver
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:23
  • @NickCraver thanks for the explanation. I do get the right IP when querying SE's nameserver, but it looks like I'll just have to wait it out until the changes propogate to the DNS servers I use (which I don't have control over).
    – nhinkle
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:24
  • @Nick I thought that might be the case. Thanks. I'll check again in 24 hours.
    – Kit Z. Fox
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:25
  • @nhinkle if you're curious, here are the preliminary results over the past 2 days of DNS from our servers vs via CloudFlare where we're moving: i.stack.imgur.com/AMFcZ.png It should make quite a dent in average load times...as will other upcoming changes...
    – Nick Craver
    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:26

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4

This was an issue with the SOA and A records being cached really hard on some DNS servers for a day. We never had a TTL higher than 5 minutes on the A and no higher than an hour on the SOA at any point, so we're at a loss to explain why some downstream DNS servers chose to cache for a full day.

The records in question are fixed now, but if you had this issue then beware your DNS server. It, or an upstream server, is not configured properly.

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