Nightly stats processing is disabling wordpress plugins

[bananacy]

The strangest thing has been happing this month! I noticed every night at midnight Two wordpress plugins get disabled. Then i realized it might be the daily apache stats processing thing running every 24hr.

I couldn't find where that gets logged but i'm assuming it does an apache restart every midnight.

my questions are:

1- which log will show the stat processing /apache restarts?
2- why if any would that break the same two plugins every night?

thanks!

/J

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! There aren't any tools that would either remove site data or restart Apache at the same time each night, and those two actions themselves would also not be related.

Stats logging also would not manipulate user data in any way.

The best thing to check for Apache would be the main error log at /etc/apache2/logs/error_log as that would show all the restarts as well as any other errors.

The plugin issue isn't something I have a good explanation for. It might be worth it to setup an audit watch on the files being removed to see if it will tell you what process is performing that work. More details on that can be found here: Auditd - The Linux Auditing System

 

[kdean]

Check to make sure your host doesn't have prohibited plugins that they may be deleting on a schedule when found.

Also, be sure the plugins are being installed from official sources such as the wordpress repository or other premium sites, just on the off chance files are being removed due to virus scan quarantine. Although one would expect that it would delete just specific files and break things rather than remove the whole folder. That's why I'm leaning towards the host prohibited plugins being the issue.