CDN CNAMEs not resolving to customer origin
- by Donald Jenkins
I have set up an Edgecast CDN to mirror all my static content. Because I use the root of my domain (donaldjenkins.com) to host my main site—using Google Analytics which sets cookies—I've stored the corresponding static files in a separate cookieless domain (donaldjenkins.info) which is used only for this purpose. I've set it up (using this guide for general guidance), with the following structure, based on a combination of customer origin and CDN origin to make the most of the chosen short domain name and provide meaningful URLs:
http://donaldjenkins.info:80 is set as the customer origin for the content stored in the CDN at directory http://wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net/8062E0/donaldjenkins.info;
I've then set up various subdomains of a separate domain, the conveniently-named cdn.dj, as CDN-origin Edge CNAMEs for each of the corresponding static content types:
js.cdn.dj points to the origin directory http://wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net/0062E0/donaldjenkins.info/js;
css.cdn.dj points to the origin directory http://wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net/0062E0/donaldjenkins.info/css;
images.cdn.dj points to the origin directory http://wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net/0062E0/donaldjenkins.info/images
and so on. This results in some pretty nice, short, clear URLs.
The DNS zone file for cdn.dj (yes, it's a real domain name registered in Djibouti) is set properly:
cdn.dj 43200 IN A 205.186.157.162
css.cdn.dj 43200 IN CNAME wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net.
images.cdn.dj 43200 IN CNAME wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net.
js.cdn.dj 43200 IN CNAME wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net.
The DNS resolves to the Edgecast URL:
$ host js.cdn.dj
js.cdn.dj is an alias for wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net.
wac.62E0.edgecastcdn.net is an alias for gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net.
gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net has address 93.184.220.20
But whenever I try to fetch a file in any of the directories to which the CNAME assets map, I get a 404:
$ curl http://js.cdn.dj/combined.js
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>404 - Not Found</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>404 - Not Found</h1>
</body>
</html>
despite the fact that the corresponding customer origin file exists:
$ curl http://donaldjenkins.info/js/combined.js
fetches the content of the combined.js file. Yet it's been more than enough time for the DNS to propagate since I set up the CDN.
There's obviously some glaring mistake in the above-described setup, and I'm a bit of a novice with CDNs—but any suggestions would be gratefully received.
