I have setup a 3 CNAME records for academy.42001.pro and www.42001.pro and 42001.pro (with flattening) all to point to iso42001.learnwor) Ilds.com - but the records are not being found on the internet.
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
I have set the CNAMEs using Cloudflare Proxy and DNS only.
What feature, service or problem is this related to?
DNS not responding/updating
What are the steps to reproduce the issue?
After adding the CNAME record on Cloudflare. I check the DNS records using Google Toolbox Dig
and the CNAME record is not found.
Since a CNAME is not permitted at the zone apex, you will never find a CNAME there. You will see either A and AAAA records of Cloudflare proxy IPs, or the IP to which your flattened CNAME resolves, depending on whether you have set that record to or , respectively.
Similar treatment of subdomain CNAMEs occurs when proxied. Synthetic A and AAAA records of the Cloudflare proxy IP are generated. If you need your CNAME published as a CNAME RR type, you will need to set it to DNS Only.
You are right. CNAME is not normally allowed at the root apex by most DNS providers. However, Cloudflare specifically feature their apex root domain ‘flattening’ which allow CNAME at the apex. I thought this was a great idea, and gives a lot special case benefits for various reasons.
But it clearly does not work, and if a CNAME is configured at the root apex, then all the other subdomain CNAMEs are not found either.
So I deleted the 42001.pro CNAME at the root apex, and everything works hunky dory!
I hope Cloudflare could look into this, as they are permitting a documented feature that does not work.
I suppose it depends on your expectations. If you are expectating the apex CNAME to be published as synthetic A and AAAA records, it works as expected.
The other CNAMEs are not found when they are proxied because such records are always published as A and AAAA records. The presence of a flattened CNAME at the apex has no impact on how other CNAMEs are published. I confirmed this myself just now by converting the apex name of one of my domains to a flattened CNAME and no change occurred to the existing CNAME subdomains in that zone. When the subdomain CNAMEs were proxied, they returned A and AAAA records of the Cloudflare proxy. Set to DNS Only, they returned a CNAME
Understood. Thanks for the the detailed and clear explanation @epic.network? which would be beneficial if it were included in a place that is visible on the Cloudflare CNAME setup info. Your explanation would avoid confusion, ambiguity, false expectation and wasted time. Is there a way to feed back this to the Cloudflare documentation team?
Kind regards
or 
, respectively.