How to remove eTag from IIS5 http headers

Question

Running IIS5 (yes, really). I'd like to remove the eTag http header that IIS generates for me. MS has an article on how to sync eTags across the web farm, but not how to remove them ( http://support.microsoft.com/?id=922733 ).

Is there a way to remove eTags?

Answer 1

AFAIK, there's no easy way to remove etag of web resources such as image, css or js files from IIS 5. As each of the etag value regenerates on each subsequent web browser refresh which is unnecessary since there might not be any changes on those web resources.

You might want to try EtagFix, it doesn't remove the etag though but it stabilizes the etag values so they don't change until the web resources are modified.

EtagFix stabilizes the etag that Internet Information Services (IIS) generates so that it doesn't change each time the web server is restarted.

http://www.isapilabs.com/Products/ETagFix/index.htm

Answer 2

Go into Inetmgr and in the website properties, switch to the HTTP Headers tab and add an "ETag" custom HTTP header with no value.

Answer 3

this blog post describes how to completely remove the Etag http header in IIS (iis 6,iis 7 and iis 7.5)

http://lightspeednow.com/blog/2010/05/21/iis-tutorial-how-to-completely-remove-etags-entity-tags-from-iis6-iis7-and-iis7-5/