magical reappearing website on IIS6

[Jason Shohet]

I had to go to our server room and put a new version of a .NET website into
production -- simply copying over newer pages. I've done it hundreds of
times on 2000 servers. This was my first time on a 2003 server.
I copied over the files. Then I went to a browser on a machine outside on
the internet (not on our network). The OLD site with the old files were
still there... Hmmm.
I went back to the 2003 server. I DELETED all the files in the site. Then
I copied in the new pages. Went to look at it again. Both on the server,
and the outside (internet) computer, the site was still showing the old
pages! Getting desparate now, I deleted the entire site. Whiped it out
entirely. And the website was still displaying!!!! I then took down IIS
completely, restarting it.
Finally, phew, no site, no webpages. I added the site again (a new subweb),
copied my pages in and everything
worked.

Anyone know what happened? Some caching thing that comes turned on by
default on 2003 server web edition?
TY Jason Shohet

 

[Scott Meddows]

It could have very well been a cached page in the browser.

Best thing to do then is (if you can) use a computer that has never been to
that website and try to open the browser there..

 

[Ken Cox [Microsoft MVP]]

Interesting... we had the same thing happening at work today. Pages that
were removed were still showing up and new pages with the same name were
showing the old version.

I restarted the Web site and the problem didn't go away, so it couldn't have
been an application cache. I think there's a very aggressive
firewall/caching software somewhere in the system.

 

[Jason Shohet]

It was like, "How do I get this thing to stop caching the page?" And I
think the caching was being done on the server, outward facing. It wasn't
the browser caching that was the problem. I went to several machines and
they showed the older pages. It was like 2003 / IIS6 comes with a caching
server built-in... wish i just knew how to tell it to flush the cache I
guess reading up on IIS 6 is the only thing to do