dig – > script everything

I love CloudFlare. I really do. It keeps me away from my slow domain provider and does the very thing I need quickly – propagation. However, there was one instance today where I became a little stuck and couldn't quite figure out the problem. A friend who asked for some DNS record help asked to route the www CNAME to their Shopify URL address. Easy! Or so I thought. So I set up a free CloudFlare account for them and did all the A and CNAME records for them to their Shopify account. After informing my friend that it wouldn't take any more than an hour or so for the DNS to propagate through he messaged me at the end of the day and said that there was something wrong with the www CNAME record. The URL of his website wasn't pointing to anything!? I checked CloudFlare and initially didn't see any problem with the way I had pointed my friends www CNAME record to the Shopify URL. After running a few dig www.friends-domain.com on the terminal noticed that I was getting this strange output: ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.friends-domain.com. 300 IN CNAME cf-protected-www.friends-domain.com. cf-protected-www.friends-domain.com. 300 IN A 108.162.XXX.XXX cf-protected-www.friends-domain.com. 300 IN A 108.162.XXX.XXX Initially it didn't twig that cf-protected stood for CloudFlare, but it didn't take me long after running an IP trace on the IP address listed that it was CloudFlare. Then, after going back to the DNS records of my friends' domain I slapped my forehead at the www action setting and clicked on the icon to prevent CloudFlare from "protecting" it. Anyway, after doing this within a matter of minutes his www domain was correctly pointing to his website. phew