Prevent VirtualBox Guest from Delivering Cached Files

Question

After editing files in my development environment and saving them to my guest OS (CentOS), the Guest delivers a cached version of the edited files (.css or .js).

At first I thought this was a local browser caching issue, but I've deleted, disabled, incinerated, etc every local cache in all 4 browsers and in the laptop (non-host) hard drive.

In addition, I tested using a machine (that has never accessed the guest) and the guest still delivered the unedited files.

I've then disabled all caching modules in Apache - I'm pretty sure (but not positive - and open to any suggestions) Apache is not the culprit.

Either my guest or my host is caching files somehow/somewhere and I can't figure out how or where.

This has been a very frustrating 48 hours - any help would be greatly appreciated.

Background:

• VirtualBox v 4.0.12
• Guest: CentOS 5.5/LAMP (Being used as a local development server) Internal IP 192.168.12.62
• Host: Windows Server 2008 (Network Config: Bridged) Internal IP 192.168.12.42
• Development files are stored on the Host and shared with the Guest via "Shared Folders"
• Application development is done on a third machine (laptop) connected to the host via mapped network drive. Internal IP 192.168.12.32
• I've configured Apache with numerous virtual IP's 192.168.12.150-180
• Please let me know if I've left anything out.

Answer 1

This forum post confirms the problem. Here's the bug report. Vboxsf doesn't play nicely with sendfile. The Apache workaround, as previously mentioned:

EnableSendFile Off

For the curious, here's the SendFile docs.