Pow domains not loading in Chrome

Question

So, I struggled with this for the last hour. For some reason, my POW domains always hit a www.website-unavailable.com error in Chrome. Rails servers work great from the traditional rails s and pull up at localhost:3000. I'm using Anvil.app to manage the domains.

No matter what, I hit the www.website-unavailable.com page in Chrome immediately each time I try to visit a .dev domain.

The strangest thing is, the site loads great in other browsers. Just not Chrome. I even tried installing Chrome Canary and it hits the exact same error (fresh install!).

I tried, in this order, to no avail, to get the server running again:

1. Rebooting.
2. pow restart in the terminal for various sites.
3. Reinstalling POW.
4. Clearing the DNS cache at chrome://net-internals#dns

Nothing seems to work. Any idea what I could do to get this working again? Not a huge deal to use localhost:3000 but I love POW. The strange thing is, it was working wonderfully for weeks.

Except

Did you try chromium (this is "open-source" build of Chrome), you can get it here chromiumupdater.sytes.net/… – Combe

Are you using OpenDNS? – Underling

@DanReedy yes, in fact, I am using OpenDNS. Should I not? – Except

@MichaelSzyndel wow! Strangely, the domain resolves in Chromium! Thank you. – Except

@DanReedy wow. I just updated my DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (the Google DNS settings) and pages actually load faster AND my Pow is working again. I would have never thought that was the issue, so thank you for your help! – Except

It is definitely a chrome issue, and not an OpenDNS issue, since .dev pow sites work perfectly in firefox and safari. Disabling async dns in chrome worked for me as mentioned below. – Pyrostat

Answer 1

Thanks to user Dan Reedy (see above) I was able to fix this by moving from OpenDNS to the Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 settings. Now, pages load faster and Pow servers are working again. And they seem to actually load much faster. Awesome!

Except

I was not using OpenDNS, but setting my DNS to 8.8.4.4 worked for me as well. – Burkley

I'm not using OpenDNS either, but suspect it's enabled for the network I'm currently on. Adding the Google DNS entries solved it for me too. – Eliciaelicit

Answer 2

I ran into the same issue, but changing from OpenDNS to Google's DNS servers didn't help. Apparently, this is an issue with the asynchronous DNS built into Chrome.

There are a couple workarounds:

• Use .xip.io domain instead of .dev
• Disable asynchronous DNS in chrome://flags
• Disable NXDOMAIN helper

I ended up disabling asynchronous DNS and my .dev domains work again.

Here's where I found more information:

• Issue reported on Pow
• Issue reported on Chrome
• How to disable NXDOMAIN helper for OpenDNS

Icebound

Disabling asynchronous DNS alone fixed the problem for me. Thanks! – Colobus

Sweet happiness. Thank you! I run dev sites on hosted VMs and Chrome would always intermittently work with DNS resolution. Exasperating! Disabling asynchronous DNS in Chrome now takes care of it and I no longer have the intermittent DNS timeouts for /etc/hosts domains. – Warner

Answer 3

I look up my IP via Network Preferences on a Mac OS X, and navigate to a domain like so :

http://subdomain.name-of-app-directory.ip-address.xip.io

So an example would be :

http://subdomain.website.10.0.0.0.22.xip.io

Inbreathe