Intermittent ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT - ZoneEdit DNS misconfiguration alongside cPanel?

[davidd]

Hi there,

I've stepped into a position to help a non-profit get their website stable, and have inherited their ZoneEdit setup from many different people before me.

An issue I am having is that when browsing their website, users intermittently get an ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT failure (this is the detailed description provided in Chrome - cross-browser testing with Safari behaves similarly but throws a more generic "page is not responding" error).

It appears random - clicking back and forth between two pages causes it to happen after 20 times of the same pages working fine. When the failure does happen, then refreshing the page always seems to load it properly a second time. I've narrowed it down to either a server or DNS issue, and was wondering if you all might be able to help me understand the DNS side of it.

The setup on ZoneEdit is basic:
- An A Record with the wildcard @ value points directly to the webserver IP
- A CNAME record points the www value to rootdomain.com
- There are four lingering nameserver records to ns1.bdm.microsoftonline.com (with incrementing numbers) - I don't think these are used anymore, but haven't yet deleted them for fear of breaking something

Has anyone encountered an intermittent timeout issue like this? The webserver they are on is running cPanel, which has it's own Zone Editor - I wonder if maybe the default values there are getting into a weird relationship with ZoneEdit further up the DNS chain?

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated - I'm stumped.

 

[sandy]

hi there
I am sorry, I would need the domain name to take a look at this.

if you can reply with the domain name of concer ni would be happy to assist.

regards

 

[davidd]

Hi Sandy,

Thanks for the willingness to take a look - I'll DM you the link out of privacy needs of my client.

A few extra details: I've tested this across different browsers, operating systems, computers, and networks - and the intermittent timeout failure is consistent across all of them.

 

[sandy]

replied to your PM

regards.

 

[davidd]

With Sandy's help, we were able to resolve a couple of DNS issues that were causing SSL issues.

It would seem (fingers crossed that it's now fixed) that the intermittent timeout issue had something to do with a valid SSL certificate existing for www.ourdomain.com but not ourdomain.com. The root of the problem was lingering nameserver records on ZoneEdit that were no longer utilized. Removing them and setting the wildcard nameserver to AUTO (as well as doing some housekeeping cleaning up A Records and CNAMEs) has smoothed out the DNS and SSL red flags.