[CentOS] conclusion of: old website keep reappering in /var/www/html

Tue Sep 26 18:45:48 UTC 2023
Marco Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net>

Hello all, and my apologies for the late answer, but as I "fixed" this
I had to patch other problems until this week...

TL;DR : I did fix the problem by "brute force", but don't really know what
happened. See bottom of email for more details.

On Thu, Sep 07, 2023 18:19:33 PM +0000, Marco Fioretti wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________

In synthesis:


- whatever the problem was, it was only on the server, no browser
stuff. I had said since the beginning that I could see the HTML
folders reappear by doing "ls -l" on the server.

- the server has no cpanel, no proxies, no security appliance etc,
  nothing of the sort. It is a VPS with the bare minimum, administered
  exclusively via SSH and cron jobs that never dido anything to
  **generate** web pages

- I did look inside /var/log, top, systemd timer units in the systemd
  unit directories, but could not recognize anything connected to this
  problem

How I "solved" the problem:

I do have a shell script on the server that I used to run hugo with
the right parameters to regenerate the website, but I NEVER included
it in any cron job. I only executed it manually when needed, because
the site was seldom updated. Well, when I changed name to that script
and made it NOT executable, the problem disappeared.

So, I probably I did miss something in the checks above, but no idea
what...

Marco