How do I set up a redirect so that I can use a CNAME record to point to our Cloud instance

[Daniel Hoeving]

We just moved from on premise Confluence to the cloud and I've been tasked with ensuring our old URL wiki.kerkhofftech.ca works with the new Confluence instance.

Using a CNAME record results in a HTTP 403 error, which probably indicates a webserver configuration issue -- since I don't know that I have access to the underlaying webserver how do I go about setting the instance URL to wiki.kerkhofftech.ca from kerkhoff.atlassian.net?

[Tim Perrault]

Hi @Daniel Hoeving 

I don't think what you are trying to do is possible with DNS alone. I would actually setup a 301 redirect. You would need access to the load balancer or web server.

[Daniel Hoeving]

That's what I'd expected, but not certain how to do that since well, it's Atlassian's server not mine :-)

[Tim Perrault]

If you want a custom URL for your instance I believe you need one of the higher plans instead of the standard plan and you need to be in the early access program. I found this.

Without that, the only thing you can do is 301 redirect to kerkhoff.atlassian.net. That way anyone hitting the old link will be redirected to the new site.

[Daniel Hoeving]

So according to their support the Early Access Program is just that a Beta channel, and not recommended for production environments -- which this is.

I set up a 301 redirect to point to the Atlassian site, but still running into the load balancer issue -- getting the "Your Atlassian Cloud site is currently unavailable" message, which kind of makes sense since the external 301 isn't much different than a cname record in this instance.

[Tim Perrault]

In your browser when you go to wiki.kerkhofftech.ca, you are seeing the url change to kerkhoff.atlassian.net, correct?

Setting up a cname won't really work. Jira relies on the base url, in this case kerkhoff.atlassian.net. So yea you could technically get it to where you see a login page, but it's going to cause havoc with other stuff.

Update*

Out of curiosity, I entered wiki.kerkhofftech.ca in my browser and it did not redirect

[Daniel Hoeving]

So no I'm not seeing the URL change.

I set up the 301 on our Sophos SG:

I changed the DNS to newwiki.kerkhofftech.ca for the redirect so that our links to the old on premise Confluence wouldn't break before I got this working.

[Tim Perrault]

I am guessing here, but the behavior so far points me to this. Do you have a redirect for https to the new site? If you enter newwiki.kerkhofftech.ca into a browser it does redirect, but just to https://newwiki.kerkhofftech.ca. Then it just stops. See if you can redirect by setting the source to specifically https://newwiki.kerkhofftech.ca to redirect to https://kerkhofftech.atlassian.net

[Daniel Hoeving]

The redirect is specifically https