TOPIC:

Hi, I am helping our club to switch over to FTH, since I used FTH in the past with another club and I know how powerful it is. During the set up I set up a subdomain alias so that we didn’t have to just use and remember the club number which is quite long.
peer2peer.toastmastersclubs.org
is the subdomain alias.
the non-aliased, long one is 2355592.toastmastersclubs.org

However, at some point something of the DNS seems to have gotten messed up, preventing some people from connecting via the alias and giving me trouble for the last few months where they would be unable to connect to the alias at times, slowing the adoption of FTH for the club.

Here is an example of the problem in action:
downforeveryoneorjustme.com/peer2peer.to...lubs.org?proto=https

where a website up-time checker I used in the past when debugging STILL can’t connect to the site.

this one says it is up:
https:/www.isitdownrightnow.com/peer2peer.toastmastersclubs.org.html

The club president frequently cannot access the site.

I suspect the DNS got deeply cached somewhere and just will never change from whatever it was cached at (because it’s been 6 month now).

Overall, is there any way to “refresh” the DNS for that subdomain so that it hopefully starts resolving 100%?

downforeveryoneorjustme.com/peer2peer.toastmasterclubs.org works for me - I suspect you have an old/cached link

How are your members accessing the website when they have trouble? Could they be clicking on a bad link?

2355592.toastmastersclubs.org/ works correctly

You are missing an "s" in peer2peer.toastmasterclubs.org

it should be  peer2peer.toastmastersclubs.org/ which works correctly.

 

Oops - that was me with the typo!
Seems to be a problem with "is it down for everyone.... "
 

Ok, I think I figured it out after using a service to connect from various places worldwide:
dnschecker.org/#A/peer2peer.toastmastersclubs.org
And from every place where they’re connecting anew it gets a greeen check mark, so new DNS checks are all good.

Unfortunately:
- There is a domain squatter that forwards arbitrary subdomains at the typo subdomain.
- It has an HTTP site but not a HTTPS site, so it doesn’t use or forward the subdomains.
- So any typos to that site either show a weird squatters page or when using HTTPS fully 404s.
- There is another squatter on the .com version of the site with no typos at all but is .com instead of .org
- plus somehow the actual right subdomain in this case got a year or more of DNS cached for club members who where checking it out when I set it up (AND domain-checker services I used during setup) so they often have trouble.

So I guess since I’m going to be on the hook for these issues forever, and we won’t easily be able to give new members the url without them typing it in wrong and running into the squatter sites, I’m going to recommend the club to get a custom domain to set up and use as the club domain.

In the meantime any advice on trying to do a subdomain reset and restart from scratch? Think a DNS subdomain reset would cause more problems than it would solve?

I am sorry but you are way off base.
peer2peer.toastmastersclubs.org is working correctly

The subdomains are controlled by us, any unmatching subdomains go to the FTH main page.
If you misspell the main FTH domain you are at the mercy of the internet.

If you are using a VPN turn it off, as we have had to block most VPN because of hackers and misuse of FTH.

You can locally clear your local device DNS, depending on your operating system the commands differ. Google is your friend.
 

Yes, I wasn’t referring to the primary domain that we are on here, or the peer2peer.toastmastersclubs.org subdomain, but rather the domains at:
toastmastersclubsDOTcom
toastmasterclubsDOTorg
toastmastersclubDOTorg

and their various behaviors for their subdomains that are going to make it difficult for debugging whether there is downtime or just a typo somewhere. I was trying to avoid linking to them to give them any benefit from what they are doing.

I will bring these findings back to my club and let them decide on a course of action.

Those domains are not ours, how they are treated on the web is not under our control.

You need to take more care when typing.