Old Website Keep Reappering In /var/www/html

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Greetings, absurd subject, but I don’t know how else I could describe what is happening. I have a small static website hosted on a CentOS 7 VPS (that I’ll update as soon as possible, but what follows is much more urgent, I must absolutely fix it asap). The website is generated by Hugo. I run hugo on my computer, then rsync everything on the server, in the /var/www/html/hugo/MYWEBSITE folder. Everything worked great for years. This week I rebuilt the whole website almost from scratch, using a different hugo theme and updating many pages. Then I ran rsync, checked the new website in my browser, jumping from page to page, and everything worked as expected: new theme, new content, new menus, everything.
2/3 minutes later, the OLD website reappeared, all of it, as if I had not ran rsync at all. For example, in the new website there is a new subfolder called “bio”, that did not exist in the old version.

If I SSH to the server, cd to /var/www/html/hugo/MYWEBSITE and run “ls -l” RIGHT AFTER running rsync, I see the “bio” subfolder. If I do “ls -l” 3 minutes later, the “bio” subfolder is no more.

I have repeated the rsync process 5/6 times before writing this email, and it’s always the same. Every time I rsync, what I uploaded lasts 2/3 minutes, then the WHOLE folder on the server is erased and refilled with the previous full version of the website.

It’s as if there were some hidden cron job somewhere that runs hugo on the OLD source files, but I can’t find it. All the standard methods one can find by googling “how to list all cron jobs” don’t show anything that may be the reason. THANKS in advance for any help, Marco

3 thoughts on - Old Website Keep Reappering In /var/www/html

  • Also check for systemd timer units in all the systemd unit directories.

    Check the system log files when this happens (“ls -lt /var/log | head”)
    to see if something’s running at that moment.

    Run top as it happens to see what jumps to the top of the process list.

    Use chattr to mark the files immutable and see what complains when it fails to change the content.

  • From what your describing, a few things to check, some may be overly obvious so I apologize if you have checked these:

    1.  Did you clear your browser cache?
    2.  Is there a proxy server that has an old version of the site cached on it, and it’s serving up the old site content instead of a refresh?
    3.  Are there multiple web servers hosting the content in a cluster and you only rsync’d to one of them, and requests for connections is doing a round robin approach?
    4.  Is there a backup mechanism or security appliance that is checking for the presence of pages on the site, doing a checksum or a diff or something, and if things have changed, then it’s putting everything back to it’s secured copy, perhaps an antimalware security tool or auto backup tool or some other tool reaching into the server and doing this check.

    Check the host names, IP addresses, mac addresses when you see the inconsistent data, and check for your bio folder w/ it present and w/o it present see if anything changes.

    Set up a new CentOS VPS w/ a LAMP stack with the same base packages installed as the existing VM (don’t clone the existing one), then put the new site there and see if it’s happening there.  If it isn’t then some kind of security mechanism is checking the data and restoring a backup.

    Just my 2 cents.

    Chris

    —
    Christopher Wensink IS Administrator Five Star Plastics, Inc
    1339 Continental Drive Eau Claire, WI 54701
    Office: 715-831-1682
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    Fax: 715-831-6075
    cwensink@five-star-plastics.com http://www.five-star-plastics.com