Sunday, November 09, 2008

Server Not Found? Lovely.

Well, I recently experienced the most excellent error on my blog of "Server Not Found 404 Error." First off, I did nothing to create the error. I'm not sure if it was GoDaddy or Blogger that caused this joyful event. My blog has been running very nicely for several years. A couple of years ago (maybe only one and half, but who's counting?) I implemented the custom domain part of blogger with a domain I have had registered for a long time. Sometime a couple of weeks ago, the server not found error started hitting chadcoley.com, but worked fine if I typed in www.chadcoley.com. However, at some point everything quite working. Fine, I'll do the research and fix it.

As it turns out, I read several other blog posts of people having similar issues. The most helpful post was from a Google group which says something about adding another A record in DNS. As it turns out, I did some comparing to other sites hosted at Blogger using GoDaddy and had to had a new A record to DNS in GoDaddy's Total DNS Control form. Oddly enough, it was a hardcoded IP Address I have never seen before. Here is now my new A record list in DNS:

ARecord @ 72.14.207.121
ARecord @ 64.233.179.121

I have never touched the 72.14.207.121 address before. Once I added the 64.233.179.121 IP I had to turn off custom domain handling through Blogger. Finally, I turned custom domain handling back on and, like magic, it worked. Ok, not quite magic, more like pain.