Subdomain loads on first try, but doesn't load after that (desktop only)

Question

UPDATE Could it be this: strict-transport-security: max-age=8640000; includeSubDomains? from curl below:

curl -I http://innovationbound.com **(notice that's my bare domain I'm curling)**
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
x-powered-by: Express
strict-transport-security: max-age=8640000; includeSubDomains
location: https://innovationbound.com/
vary: Accept
content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
content-length: 62
date: Sun, 04 May 2014 15:21:06 GMT
connection: keep-alive

So, I've got the weirdest bug. If I clear my cache (firefox and chrome) and then load my blog: blog.innovationbound.com, it loads fine. But, after that, if I type in the url, or click on a link to the blog, or any path within the blog, I get a connection timed out.

My blog is hosted at Tumblr, innovationbound.tumblr.com, I have a CNAME record that points blog.innovationbound.com and www.blog.innovationbound.com to tumblr's domains.tumblr.com site. That's how tumblr works that out apparently.

Aside from that, I have a node.js website up and running at innovationbound.com. I have some middleware that ensures everything goes through ssl, so anything that hits that server gets redirected to https://...

Now nothing should hit that server if the CNAME records are working alright.

One other note: there used to be a redirect (301) from the bare domain to the www subdomain (because ssl only applied to www). That has since changed cause ssl applies to both (woohoo!).

Now when blog.innovationbound.com doesn't load, the problem loading page error shows up with https://blog.innovationbound.com, which is not what I typed in the first place, or what any links to our blog say either.

Any help would rock!

Answer 1

The problem seems to be that your middleware is also redirecting blog.innovationbound.com to use SSL, but only in some browsers.

Browsing to innovationbound.tumblr.com, the response is:

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://blog.innovationbound.com/

Browsing to http://blog.innovationbound.com/ in Chrome and Firefox results in being redirected to https://blog.innovationbound.com/

Browsing to http://blog.innovationbound.com/ in Safari presents the page without using SSL.

There are 4 IPs returned for blog.innovationbound.com, none of which accept https connections:

blog.innovationbound.com is an alias for domains.tumblr.com.
domains.tumblr.com. 30  IN  A   66.6.40.74
domains.tumblr.com. 30  IN  A   66.6.40.75
domains.tumblr.com. 30  IN  A   66.6.40.76
domains.tumblr.com. 30  IN  A   66.6.40.81