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