CUNY Academic Commons

Hi All,

Strange issue here. Commons user, Miranda (mfedock), is trying to access https://cunyhumanitiesalliance.org/, which is a site on the commons with a mapped domain. She is an admin.

Even when she is logged into the commons, and she goes to this site, she cannot get into the dashboard because the commons reads her as logged out when accessing the site. We have tried 3 browsers and clearing cache multiple times. (video 1)

Even stranger, when she tried on my computer (video 2), she could not log into the commons, even though this is the username/password combo she just used on her own computer (video 1)

Colin had helped her move the domains over during the migration and she forwarded me those messages, which ill include excepts of below, in case the mapping is part of the issue. (weirdly, her domain host is reclaim, and they did not support the methods we used for mapping so COlin helped her figure out a workaround, I guess)

From the mapping process emails

Miranda: Our original domain registrar, Reclaim Hosting, didn’t support CNAME flattening, so we transferred the domain to Cloudflare. I was notified that the transfer was approved and went through yesterday – however, the website itself is still down (cunyhumanitiesalliance.org), and I can’t figure out why. Any help you can offer would be appreciated. Thanks so much.

Colin:

We have had many users dealing with a lack of CNAME flattening support from their registrars. Thank you for taking that step of changing to Cloudflare in order to get around it. In the meantime, we actually figured out a way to keep using A records. I am not sure if this will help get the site back (I can say more once I have that screenshot), but you could try going back to the A record that you had before pointing to 146.96.128.200. Just make sure to also delete any new CNAME record(s) that you made.

If the A record does the trick, you can keep using it after we migrate hosts, but it will need to be changed to point to 15.204.146.102 instead. However, you should ONLY make that change after our migration downtime begins at 10:30am on Wednesday the 15th. The downtime will go until at least Friday morning, so you could make the change at any point in that time window. Then everything will be ready to go when the downtime ends and the Commons comes back on its new host.

....

I'd recommend removing the "www" CNAME record pointing to the Commons URL, then restoring the A record you had before pointing to 146.96.128.200 and with the "" symbol for the Name field so it covers the root domain. If you can do that today it should bring the site back, and then at some point between tomorrow and Friday morning, when the Commons is fully down for our host migration, you can change the "" A record to 15.204.146.102 so it's ready when the Commons comes back.