Donald Jenkins's questions

I have a Ubuntu 18.04 server on an Amazon EC2 instance running Apache 2, with an SSL certificate installed, which I use exclusively to host virtual hosts for .tld variations of the policymakr.com domain, sharing the same fixed IP.

I want the configuration to achieve the following:

1. the main domain (policymakr.domains, which has a index.html page and is meant to be accessible on the server by SSL) to be accessible on the server;
2. all the other tlds to redirect via a 301 redirect to https://www.policymakr.com which is hosted separately by a managed WordPress host;
3. redirect all http inbound policymakr.domains traffic to https, and all policymakr.domains traffic to www.policymakr.domains.

(The reason I'm doing this is because I want to remap the tlds via a 301 for SEO purposes, and this can't be achieved by the host of my WordPress site because the site is hosted on a shared server.)

I started setting up the tlds, and they redirected fine. The .conf files for the tlds (.net, .org, .info and .io) are all identical and look like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin [email protected]
   ServerName www.policymakr.[tld]
   DocumentRoot /var/www/html/policymakr.[tld]/
   ErrorLog /var/www/logs/error.log
   Redirect 301 / https://www.policymakr.com/
</VirtualHost>

After I set up the tld virtual hosts, the 301 Redirects all started working flawlessly.

I kept setting up the virtual host for policymakr.domains to last, owing to the slight extra complexity of needing to install an external SSL certificate (Amazon certificates don't seem to be able to be attached to EC2 instances).

The policymakr.domains virtual host I set up looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin [email protected]
   ServerName www.policymakr.domains
   ServerAlias policymakr.domains
   DocumentRoot /var/www/html/policymakr.domains/
   ErrorLog /var/www/logs/error.log
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^policymakr\.domains
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.policymakr.domains/$1 [R=permanent,L]
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
   ServerName www.policymakr.domains
   ServerAlias policymakr.domains
   DocumentRoot /var/www/html/policymakr.domains/
   SSLEngine on
   SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/[crt file name]
   SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/private/[private key]
   SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl/[bundle file]
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^policymakr\.domains
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.policymakr.domains/$1 [R=permanent,L]
</VirtualHost>

After this, the redirections for policymakr.domains are functioning exactly as I wanted (i.e., non-www to www, http to https), but the 301 Redirects for the other tlds have stopped working. Instead, they all now redirect to https://www.policymakr.domains.

I basically don't know what I'm getting wrong here.

I recently decided to comply with the YSlow recommendation that static content is hosted on a cookieless domain.

As I already use the root of my domain (donaldjenkins.com) to host my website—on which Google Analytics sets a few cookies—that meant I had to move the CNAME URL for the CDN serving the static files from cdn.donaldjenkins.com to an entirely separate, dedicated domain. I purchased cdn.dj (yes, it's a real Djibouti domain name), hosted the files on the root (which contains nothing else, other than a robots.txt file) and set a CNAME of e.cdn.dj for the CDN. This setup works, but I was rather surprised to find that YSlow was still flagging the static files for not being cookie-free: here's a screenshot:

The cdn.djdomain was new, and was never used for anything other than hosting these static files. Running httpfox on the site shows the _utma and _utmz Google Analytics cookies are being set on the static files listed above—despite their being hosted on an entirely separate, dedicated domain.

Here's my Google Analytics code:

//Google Analytics tracking code
var _gaq=[['_setAccount','UA-5245947-5'],['_trackPageview']];
(function(d,t){var g=d.createElement(t),s=d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];
g.src=('https:'==location.protocol?'//ssl':'//www')+'.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
s.parentNode.insertBefore(g,s)}(document,'script'));
// [END] Google Analytics tracking code

I'm not obsessing about this issue—I know it's not really affecting server performance—but I'd like to just understand what is causing it not to go away...

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:

1. 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;

2. 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.