Web caching liability

Fri Jan 2 12:37:16 UTC 1998

Brian Horvitz wrote:

> Has anyone else exerienced problems with AOL's web proxy servers?  We
> switched the IP address of a web site about 5 months ago, and we are still
> getting about 10,000 hits a day from AOL on the old address.  We dropped a
> note to them a ways back but didn't get much of a response.

they've been problems for a long time; some of their proxy servers 
hold cache data for far too long. i have some web discussion pages 
that are effectively useless for aol subscribers because aol even 
caches cgi generated stuff with obvious cgi related extensions like 
".cgi" and ".pl".

they appear to have little organizational control over the software 
running on their server farm, either for software versions or 
configuration files; there are clearly several different variants of 
sendmail running, in addition to several different versions of 
their proxy software. it's kind of a mess, and they've never returned 
any of my email notes.

sigh,
  richard
-- 
Richard Welty                      Chief Internet Engineer, INet Solutions    
welty at inet-solutions.net             http://www.inet-solutions.net/~welty/
888-311-INET