Adding new CNAME - 403 Forbidden error

Hosting Support
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Website URL

ExileIsland.net

Error Message

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /panel/modules-new/cnamerecords/add.php on this server.
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This is what comes up whenever I click “add” after filling in the info on the CNAME records on the VistaPanel page. I know that the cname records was unavailable for a few weeks awhile back. But now that it’s returned to the settings page, this is the error I get when trying to use it now. It gives this error no matter what info I try to put into the boxes. I already have an existing cname for a different subdomain of my site that is working. No idea what to do now.

Any idea why this is happening?

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What is the record you are trying to add?

I tried adding some testing records and they all worked fine for me:

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I was linking to a site that was made with the Odoo site builder.

edit: sorry, more precisely… exile-island.odoo.com/

4

It’s possible that not every CNAME record causes this error, only specific ones which trigger security filters.

Could you please share the exact CNAME record you’re trying to setup? That way we can reproduce the issue and investigate what’s causing it.

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Note that the “/” at the end of the destination was just there from me pasting it, and I forgot to remove it before taking the screenshot
What I was putting in exactly… was source: “www”, for exileisland.net, and the destination: “exile-island.odoo.com”

I’m trying to use a CNAME record on my root domain. (exileisland.net). but reading online, you can’t put a CNAME record on a root domain? Is that correct?

HOWEVER, it finally did allow me to add the CNAME record tonight… But now, it looks like I cannot remove the original redirect that exileisland.net had to exileisland.tip4serv.com
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I get an almost identical error as I was getting before when trying to add the CNAME?
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I feel like I’m good at breaking my own toys here at infinity free. :frowning:

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I was able to add a www record for www.testingtheissue.infinityfreeapp.com to point to your record, so the slash at the end might have played a part. I’d recommend manually deleting the redirect (editing your .htaccess file in your htdocs folder to remove the redirect rule, not using the tool in VistaPanel) and trying again.

That being said, I wouldn’t advise creating a record for www. Is there a specific reason you want to do this?

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Our hosting doesn’t really support hosting the base domain elsewhere, so you may want to take another approach to this.

If you just want to host your base domain with another provider, I would recommend against using our nameservers in the first place. If you use any other DNS provider (like your domain provider), you can just point your base domain to Odoo and your subdomain to us.

That is correct. The official DNS standards do not allow CNAME records to be setup on the base domain. If you want it to be hosted with Odoo, then Odoo may have instructions for it. Depending on the DNS solution you choose, you could also setup a web redirect from your base domain to the www subdomain, or maybe CNAME flattening or ALIAS records to configure a CNAME target on the root.

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edit: thank you for taking the time to help me. I will apologize in advance for my lack of knowledge. I’m not super well versed in web hosting knowledge. So I may be using terms incorrectly or just basically having no idea what I’m doing. :frowning:

I was able to add a www record for www.testingtheissue.infinityfreeapp.com to point to your record, so the slash at the end might have played a part.

I just went and refilled in those boxes just to take the screenshot, and when actually filling in the form the other night and it was failing, the slash was not in there. But it did end up allowing me to create the cname yesterday - after about 24 hrs after it failed initially, but it didn’t function on Odoo’s side.

Instead of landing on “exileisland.net” and it looking like the exile-island.odoo.com page, my domain would load up as https://www.odoo.com/typo?domain=www.exileisland.net&autodbname=www&hosting=eu250a.odoo.com which was basically a 404 page saying the “www” subdomain didn’t exist. So I’m assuming the error was with me using “www” as the source?

That being said, I wouldn’t advise creating a record for www . Is there a specific reason you want to do this?

I was doing it this way, as what I was taught was that when trying to reference the root I could use “@” or “www”, but apparently that’s not the case. Also, VistaPanel says that “@” is an illegal character for source.

I’d recommend manually deleting the redirect (editing your .htaccess file in your htdocs folder to remove the redirect rule, not using the tool in VistaPanel) and trying again.

I will definitely do this tonight when I can sit down and fiddle with it some more.

If you just want to host your base domain with another provider, I would recommend against using our nameservers in the first place.

I want to use my domain, I just wanted to use the site someone set up for our game server on our domain name without transferring over to their hosting system. I’ve been here for a while and I like it here. The support is great here even when we have issues, and everyone is super helpful when I’m learning the proper way to get things like this done. Also, it’s free! You can’t beat it. Our game server shop makes very little money, and it wouldn’t make sense for me to be in the red paying for hosting while trying to grow our game server.

If you use any other DNS provider (like your domain provider), you can just point your base domain to Odoo and your subdomain to us.

A lot of this went over my head, and I’ll have to do some reading to really understand better. My thoughts were just that was now that someone has built me this nice little site on Odoo, I would be able to have the site appear on my page when they go to “exileisland.net”. Similar to how when they go to “shop.exileisland.net” they see my webstore - which is actually hosted at “exileisland.tip4serv.com”. I think that it must just be slightly different when trying to do this for the base domain instead of a subdomain.

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OK, so here is a little primer on how DNS hosting works.

Every domain name must be registered by a registrar. This is the company that manages your ownership of the domain name. For exileisland.net, that’s Bluehost.

From the domain registrar, you configure DNS hosting for your domain. DNS basically lets you configure which part of your domain is hosted where. If you buy a web hosting package, you’ll have website hosting, email hosting and DNS hosting all in a singular package. But you can mix and match. InfinityFree.com is registered at NameSilo, DNS hosting is provided by Cloudflare, email hosting is provided by Google and website hosting is provided by a number of different providers.

Right now, your domain exileisland.net is using DNS hosting from us. This works well if you also want to host your website with us, but from what I gather, you actually want to host exileisland.net with Odoo. If so, I would suggest to use a different DNS hosting for your domain. From there, you have full control to point www.exileisland.net to Odoo, and subdomains of your domain to other providers, including us.

In order to make exileisland.net and www.exileisland.net work on Odoo, you must link the domain to your site on Odoo so Odoo knows that www.exileisland.net is an alias of exile-island.odoo.com. The fact that you’re using a CNAME record doesn’t matter here, that information is not available to Odoo when your browser tries to request the page.

Odoo has instructions on this subject.

https://www.odoo.com/documentation/17.0/administration/maintain/domain_names.html#domain-name-existing

Looking at these instructions, it seems that Odoo doesn’t provide the ability to link the base domain to their platform, and instead recommend to setup a redirect on your website to redirect exileisland.net to www.exileisland.net, and point only www.exileisland.net to Odoo.

Again, our DNS hosting is not a good fit for this. You can use any other DNS hosting provider you want. Maybe Bluehost provides DNS hosting along with their domain name registration, but you can also use a third party service like Cloudflare for this.

You can still use our hosting to handle the redirect from exileisland.net to www.exileisland.net, but other services can do that too.

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