Backup creating unwanted files

[soundguy]

I just had a hardware failure on an old server (CentOS 4.3 - RELEASE) and had to restore a few hundred accounts by mounting the backup drive on a new server (CentOS 5.1 - RELEASE) and using "restore multiple sites". Everything went smoothly except that I started getting calls from clients complaining that their mail and ftp worked but the site was showing a blank page. As it turns out, the restore mechanism had decided that every public_html directory must contain an index.html and if it didn't exist, it was created. That means all sites using a .php, .shtml, .pl, .cgi, as an index page stopped working because by default, .htm and .html have a higher priority.

I'd certainly like to know which rocket surgeon at cPanel thought that this insane behavior was a good idea.

[soundguy]

Upon further examination of the situation, it seems as though the restore routines are jamming the server's default skeleton files into restored sites. I don't ever recall that happening with any of the hundreds of other restorations I've done over the years.