LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

Woo-hoo! Back on line! Rambler, my web server, suffered a hard drive failure last weekend. I was able to recover all the data, but I needed to rebuild the server. So, I bought two new 200GB hard drives (to run a mirrored pair) and did some practice installs of Windows Server 2003 using Virtual PC. Today when I tried to install the OS on real hardware, it didn't work. So, I had to switch to plan B and reinstall from scratch. Took quite a while, but we're back. I'm still working on getting things set up, so it might be a while before everything comes back. But the new OS and new hard drives seem to be snappier. I like it. I've got so much hard drive space, I don't know what to do with it. I'm just leaving a big chunk unpartitioned at the moment. :)

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Arrg. That was painfull. For some reason, changes I made to my web site were not showing up. Even though the file was changed and the browser was not caching the file, the web server insisted on returning a stale version of the file. Well, it turns out that in IIS 6.0, ASP pages are cached once they are compiled. Since all my pages are ASP scripts, they were all getting cached and subsequent edits were ignored. There are instructions on how to use the GUI to disable the caching, however, the "cache options" tab referred to in the instructions does not exist! So I had to edit the IIS metabase by hand. Thankfully it's an XML file so that's relatively easy. Unfortunately, while the docs say you should be able to disable caching per web site (LM/W3SVC/n), I wasn't able to get it to stop caching the web pages until I changed it globally (LM/W3SVC).

The caching concept seems like a good idea, except they don't actually detect when the in-memory cache gets out of sync with the file system. Unfortunately, the only way to flush the cache seems to be to bounce the server! That's not really feasible from a script running inside the server to be bounced. :)