Custom Domains And Yahoo DNS Hosting

Custom Domain Publishing has come a long way since February 2007, when I wrote Custom Domain Names Hosted By Blogger. For a while, each custom domain was setup by hand, resulting in a variety of configurations. This prompted my Custom Domain Setup series of articles.

Then, Blogger developed the "Buy A Domain For Your Blog" wizard, and the Custom Domain Google Apps configuration, which provided an easy and standard setup. This worked for domains setup specifically to host Blogger blogs, as well as domains which host additional services. This lead, eventually, to my Righteous Solutions and Spurious Solutions pair of articles.

mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 64.233.179.121
mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 66.249.81.121
mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 72.14.207.121
www.mydomain.com. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

That was a clean setup, and it worked for both "nitecruzr.net" and "www.nitecruzr.net", and for services besides a plain Blogger blog - for a while.

(Update 2008/12): Servers "64.233.179.121" and "66.249.81.121" having been removed from service, the correct configuration is now:

mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 72.14.207.121
www.mydomain.com. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

or possibly

mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 216.239.32.21
mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 216.239.34.21
mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 216.239.36.21
mydomain.com.  3600 IN A 216.239.38.21
www.mydomain.com. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

Occasionally, we see something vaguely resembling the latter setup.

mydomain.com. 1200 IN A 68.142.212.118
mydomain.com. 1200 IN A 68.142.212.119
mydomain.com. 1200 IN A 68.142.212.120
mydomain.com. 1200 IN A 68.142.212.121
mydomain.com. 1200 IN A 68.142.212.122
mydomain.com. 1200 IN A 68.142.212.123
www.mydomain.com. 600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

p10w2.geo.mud.yahoo.com (68.142.212.118)
68.142.192.0 - 68.142.255.255
Inktomi Corporation

The "68.142.212.nnn" series of DNS servers are the Yahoo equivalent of Google Apps. A Yahoo registered domain, in the Yahoo world, gets the same treatment as a Google Apps custom domain, with integrated, online accessories for the primary domain. But the primary domain goes to the Yahoo servers, instead of to the Google Apps servers.

And, when an anxious blogger selects "Redirect mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com.", and gets a well known (and not loved) error

Another blog is already hosted at this address

and the DNS setup involves Yahoo as the registrar, that is why. Recycling the domain settings, in Google Apps, won't solve this problem.

Right now, we have no experience with making a Blogger blog, published to the primary domain, work properly when Yahoo DNS is involved. It appears that the best solution, in this case, is to get a third party DNS service that supports "CNAME" referral, and avoid Yahoo DNS altogether.

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Diagnosing Problems With Custom Domains - Case Study #7

Google Apps, which I originally identified in my second custom domain case study, and later in a separate article, Custom Domain Publishing, And Google Apps, is what I shall call a Web Services Aggregator. Google Apps gives us the ability to combine a Blogger blog using a non-BlogSpot URL in a domain with other Google and non-Google services.

Google Apps is not the only web services aggregator that we have identifed recently. Yahoo provides a similar setup.

Let's look at a Yahoo Web Services setup, using a hypothetical domain, "mydomain.net" (name changed here to protect the unfortunate).

First, let's dig the DNS records for the primary domain "mydomain.net".

 ;; QUESTION SECTION:
 ;mydomain.net.   IN A
 
 ;; ANSWER SECTION:
 mydomain.net.  1200 IN A 68.180.151.21
 mydomain.net.  1200 IN A 68.180.151.22
 mydomain.net.  1200 IN A 68.180.151.23
 mydomain.net.  1200 IN A 68.180.151.24
 mydomain.net.  1200 IN A 68.180.151.25
 mydomain.net.  1200 IN A 68.180.151.26

p2w12.geo.sp1.yahoo.com (68.180.151.21)
68.180.128.0 - 68.180.255.255
Yahoo 

Next, the "www" alias "www.mydomain.net".

 ;; QUESTION SECTION:
 ;www.mydomain.net.   IN A
 
 ;; ANSWER SECTION:
 www.mydomain.net.  600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
 ghs.google.com.  40765 IN CNAME ghs.l.google.com.
 ghs.l.google.com. 300 IN A 72.14.207.121

You'll have no problem with publishing to "www.mydomain.net", as the primary URL for "mydomain.net". I don't think that Yahoo Web Services provides an option to "Redirect mydomain.net to www.mydomain.net.", though.

Yahoo provides 6 servers, in contrast to 3 provided by Google. To date, nobody has succeeded in configuring the 6 Yahoo servers to address anything but Yahoo content. This makes Yahoo Web Services useless for using the primary domain in a Google Custom Domain.

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FTP Publishing - An Example Of The Complexity

Publishing a blog to an external server, using FTP, has always presented interesting challenges. I've been writing about those challenges for some time, and occasionally describing their seemingly random nature. This week, we see one example of the randomness, which is being experienced by those publishing to Yahoo Small Business.

I got on the phone with Yahoo Small Business, and went through the trouble shooting process. ... One of the things about the Yahoo Small Business accounts is Yahoo teamed up with ATT SBC. With that team up, it created a weird log on user name, with two @@ in the user name to use FTP publishing. For example: you need both the [email address]@user-[email address]

The solution, in this case, and recommended by Yahoo Small Business is to

create another FTP User ID independent of the main User ID.

In other words, Yahoo Small Business made a change, it wasn't successfully communicated to their customers, and it took a joint session between one customer and one company representative to realise the oddity

a weird log on user name, with two @@ in the user name

Looking further, we see additional details. Having created a Yahoo FTP User ID, we have to make that User ID usable.

once you've added the new FTP user/password in Small Business, be sure to click the link that says "Enable FTP access" in the "FTP Access Point" column. This gives that new username access to publish on your whole site.

I suspect this is simply one example why Google Custom Domains should be the solution of choice for publishing a blog to a non-BlogSpot URL.

Yahoo Small Business is simply one FTP host. How many others might there be, with similar peccadillo's?

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