resolve problem with cybermysteres.ca domain
Posted by sarneil on 03 Feb 2009 in Activity log
The reported problem was that the URL cybermysteres.ca pointed to the English language file mysteryquests.ca/indexen.html rather than cybermysteres.ca/indexfr.html. The two domains were supposedly pointing to the same folder (public in the mysteryquests.ca account), but my testing showed that was not the case. After a couple of hours on the phone with their tech support I arrived at the following:
Previously, the cybermysteres.ca domain had a "hosted" package, which meant an account on the server was set up to host web pages and email for that domain. That account was set up so that when the user went to cybermysteres.ca in their browser, the server forwarded the browser to mysteryquests.ca, so when the actual site got that request it saw the mysteryquests.ca and displayed the English language page. The first thing I did was to get them to change that forwarding to mysteryquests.ca/indexfr.html, so at least the French language page would appear. The problem remained that the domain name "mysteryquests.ca" rather than "cybermysteres.ca" appeared.
To solve that problem, I had to change the type of hosting package for the cybermysteres.ca account from a "hosted" type to a "domain pointing" type. That means that the cybermysteres.ca domain no longer has disk space assigned to it, and that all it does is point somewhere else. I got them to point the domain cybermysteres.ca to the public folder in the cybermysteries.ca account, which is exactly what we wanted. The change in the type of hosting package means we can't have email addresses which end in "@cybermysteres.ca". I was willing to pay that price to get the domain name to work in the browser. The contact page on the site provides admin@canadianmysteries.ca as the contact email, so that will continue to work just fine.
There is still some slightly odd behaviour with the cybmermysteres.ca domain: for example, when you go to cybermysteres.ca and start clicking around, the URL box in the browser never changes even though you are moving from page to page. Compare that with what happens when you go to mysteryquests.ca/indexfr.html (where the URL box does change as you move from page to page - which is the correct behaviour). For now, I'm willing to leave that be. That's likely because they're using a mod_rewrite instead of a mod_proxy, but I don't know.