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Custom Domain Publishing, And "403 Forbidden"

Next to its immediate cousin error
Another blog is already hosted at this address
I don't know of too many more frustrating Blogger error states than seeing
403 Forbidden
Most cases of "403 Forbidden", seen and discussed recently in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, have geographical affinity - and are typically transient - and apply to blogs published to "blogspot.com".

Some cases of "403 Forbidden" however, will involve custom domain publishing, where the blog owner should - but most likely will not - see
Another blog is already hosted at this address
When publishing the blog to the domain.

In some cases, when publishing a blog to an incorrectly setup custom domain, the custom domain publishing wizard will fail to detect the incorrect DNS addresses. Instead of the blog owner, seeing immediately
Another blog is already hosted at this address.
The owner will see
Your blog has been published.
Later, the blog owner - and all potential blog readers - see the secondary symptom
403 Forbidden
.




Here, we have an excellent example of the problem - diagnosis, and treatment.

Let's first look at a Dig log extract.
jubileeventure.org.uk.    86400    IN    A    94.136.40.75
www.jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN    A    94.136.40.75

Now, an HTTP trace extract, showing unsuccessful access to the domain.
Sending request:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.jubileeventure.org.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 94.136.40.75
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...
Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·403·Forbidden(CR)(LF)
The solution to this problem involves a standard misconfigured domain diagnosis (excerpted here), and requires DNS address correction.
Here's what you have:

jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN A 94.136.40.75
www.jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN A 94.136.40.75

Google custom domain publishing requires properly setup referrals to Google servers. "94.136.40.75" is not a Google server.

Here's what you need:

jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN A 216.239.32.21
jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN A 216.239.34.21
jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN A 216.239.36.21
jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN A 216.239.38.21
www.jubileeventure.org.uk. 86400 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
I have followed the steps yet, still no give. I use fatcow and have managed to previously route my blog for a second. However instead of www.macmurmur.com I recieve http://start.macmurmur.com I called fatcow and they said it's google's problem. I have no idea what to do, I'm loosing tons of traffic that I have built up, due to the errors.
Nitecruzr said…
Rob,

You're reporting a Start Page redirect, which is similar to a Sites redirect. If the linked article does not give you enough details, please post a report in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2010/05/custom-domains-redirecting-to-google.html

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