Freeserve Websites - Old Versions Randomly Appear

clippings

I have a freeserve.co.uk website and an fsnet.co.uk website. Old versions dating from around March 2014 sometimes appear, at other times the latest version appears. (But never a version from between March and the latest version.)

There are still lots of freeserve, fsnet, wanadoo and fsbusiness websites out there. Has anyone else noticed old versions of their website mysteriously reappearing online?

One example is http://www.panddh.fsnet.co.uk/. The latest version of the page has 6 paragraphs of text. The old March version has just one line of text. Which version did you get?

Can any techie explain how this could possibly be happening. And no, it's not a cache thing.

UPDATE.

The reason all freeserve websites were toggling between their latest and their March 2014 versions was that there were two versions of these websites online. Latest versions at one IP address, March versions at another IP address.

Domain Name Servers translate a URL into an IP address. Two of the ISP's DNSs were routing to the IP with the latest versions, the other two were routing to the IP address containing March versions! These two DNSs have (for the moment anyway) been de-activated leaving the two remaining DNSs which route all visitors to the IP with the latest versions of freeserve, fsnet, orangehome, wanadoo etc websites.

esuhl

Could it be due to the host having the content on multiple load-balanced servers, where some of the servers aren't updating correctly...?

For what it's worth, I see the September 2014 content when I try that address.

mike39

No idea what might be causing this, though it's presumably a problem with Orange (EE), but I see the one line version of that page.

paulstar

Here's another one: http://www.divdev.fsnet.co.uk/scicaf.htm. Sometimes you get it dated 16 March 2014, sometimes dated 20 September 2014. Weird. I tried it several times half an hour apart and seems there's a ~50:50 chance which version you get. (Refresh each time to update your cache.) Very weird.

I see the old version of www.panddh.fsnet.co.uk - just one short line of text. Ah, no, looked at that site again and got the September version.

Very interesting, I'd love to know how this can be happening. I'll do some digging.

esuhl

Strange. I've tried a number of times with the above links, but I always get the later version of the page.

What ISP do people affected by this have? Could it be that one of the ISP's caching servers is failing to update the cache correctly...?

jaydeeuk1

paulstar wrote: »

Here's another one: http://www.divdev.fsnet.co.uk/scicaf.htm. Sometimes you get it dated 16 March 2014, sometimes dated 20 September 2014. Weird. I tried it several times half an hour apart and seems there's a ~50:50 chance which version you get. (Refresh each time to update your cache.) Very weird.

I see the old version of www.panddh.fsnet.co.uk - just one short line of text. Ah, no, looked at that site again and got the September version.

Very interesting, I'd love to know how this can be happening. I'll do some digging.

I got 16th march when loading up.
Pressing 'ctrl' + f5 does not force loading of the newer page. Could be a load balancing issue as mentioned above but depending on how aggressive it is I would have thought the effect be random. I'm on plusnet. This is the same in both IE and chrome.

jaydeeuk1

clippings wrote: »

I have a freeserve.co.uk website and an fsnet.co.uk website. Old versions dating from around March 2014 sometimes appear, at other times the latest version appears. (But never a version from between March and the latest version.)

There are still lots of freeserve, fsnet, wanadoo and fsbusiness websites out there. Has anyone else noticed old versions of their website mysteriously reappearing online?

One example is http://www.panddh.fsnet.co.uk/. The latest version of the page has 6 paragraphs of text. The old March version has just one line of text. Which version did you get?

Can any techie explain how this could possibly be happening. And no, it's not a cache thing.

And I get the version with 6 lines of text - the newer one.

jaydeeuk1

If this was one of my servers, I'd be first looking at a wrongly reset date/time format (a xenserver crash and auto reboot set date back to year 2000 and played havoc with a database server), likewise if servers are in a pool and a client node fails, and the backup node which was forgotten about kicked in with outdated sources could affect it, similar to the load balancing suggestion above. In other words, I haven't a clue.

paulstar

It looks like there was a change to EE's IP hosting arrangements - guess when? - in March. See Whatmyip.

Can someone tell us what the info on that page implies and how it might explain what is happening?

clippings

Thanks for the ideas, specially paulstar. As I understand it, you're suggesting that when EE changed their hosting setup in March, a server got left off the list of servers to be updated so it still contains data as it was in March?