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So I migrated a mediawiki site to a new Server. The old one is still up but the database is locked and I merge the new Content with rsync and mysqldump every 15 min. So we can read the content from the old IP.

Now I changed the A record of the domain to point to the new server. After 3 hours and when I am using a cache cleared browser, I am at the new server.

However, when I am using an not cache cleared browser, I am landing at the old server.

How to tell the browser, that it should clear its dns cache, or that there is an IP change?

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    There's no reliable way, since upstream servers may also hold the cache. You could try another name server, or running your own (which you can clear whenever)
    – jornane
    Aug 14, 2015 at 21:54

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You can't tell the browsers of random people on the Internet to flush their caches; it's not how things are done. For next time, remember to reduce the TTL on your A records to some suitably small value (like, say, "five minutes") some time before the change over will happen; at least as long as the previous TTL was set to. That will limit the time that well-behaved Internet citizens will cache, and the transition will complete nice and quickly. Once the change occurs and sufficient time has passed, the TTL can be switched back to something longer.

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For next time, remember to reduce the TTL on your A records to some suitably small value (like, say, "five minutes") some time before the change over will happen; at least as long as the previous TTL was set to. That will limit the time that well-behaved Internet citizens will cache, and the transition will complete nice and quickly.

Even doing this WELL ahead of time (with NetSol), we are hearing user reports that they are still landing on the old "site" which is now just a custom error page. Stubborn browsers!

But asking visitors to try a different browser seems to be the easiest solution for even the most novice users.

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