Solving Analog X Proxy DNS Caching Problem

As I informed earlier we made a major move to a new server in the last few days. All the websites have moved over. There was lots of testing. What surprised me was that most of my tester’s were getting a stale copy of the pages, despite page refresh and clearing of cache. It turned out to be a DNS caching issue with Analog X Proxy server.

Analog X provides a nice proxy server for free. Today I realized it also caches DNS data (host name to ip address mapping) for free and for unknown (but pretty long) duration. So if you are using Analog X proxy and are unable to access any webserver then it may be that you are getting served from a stale IP address by AnalogX. There is nothing wrong with DNS caching. Lot’s of application like Agnitum Firewall caches DNS data. In fact it is a benefit in normal circumstances as it speeds up web access and prevents loading of DNS servers (which caches the data too). The problem is because AnalogX proxy server doesn’t advertise it anywhere and provides no way to disable the cache.

The solution is simple. Simply restart the Analog X proxy server. It appears to clear the cache.