Landing intermittently on wrong website!

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Scenario:
We have a dozen different websites hosted on our multiple C5 servers. We added a new website to confirm up/down HTTP status on each server. Simple html code that returns "OK" as a page.

Symptom:

When asking forhttp://www.realwebsite1.com/ (landing page), we are INTERMITTENTLY receivinghttp://www.diagnosticsite.com/index.html... page for no reason!

No one is touching DNS, and it happens spuriously on ANY of the other 12 websites.

We've intentionally named the .conf file for the diagnostics instance to zzzzzzz.conf, just so we know that it is read in "last", and won't prevent any existing definitions from being reviewed first. And yet, we have the LANDING PAGE for a site get the diagnostic's landing page?

How is that even possible?

We've reloaded and restarted services, and we initially don't see any problems, but over time, the diagnostics page will inexplicably appear. I am concerned that this is a caching issue, as this diagnostics page is polled on each host/server/node "every 5 seconds."

 
briankinney replied on at Permalink Reply
Does anyone else ever have this problem?
TRV replied on at Permalink Reply
TRV
We witnessed a very similar problem. It was a sporadic glitch where links in the main navigation menu would occasionally redirect a visitor to to an entirely different website.

We too had wondered if it was a caching issue. We devised a workaround, but did not find the root cause.

Our main website is 5.7.5.2. The entirely different website is WordPress. We host both websites on our own Virtual Private Server with liquidweb.

I am not a developer, so I do not know how to give you the proper terminology. But that is the gist of it.
briankinney replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks for the reply!

I was genuinely concerned that no one ever read these forums.

Can you describe your workaround for me? I may need to implement it.
TRV replied on at Permalink Reply
TRV
Our workaround was to develop custom code that looks for errant domain names in the main navigation menu and corrects them. It replaces the wrong domain name with the right one.

It does not cure the root cause. The root cause remains unknown to us. However, now our visitors are not being redirected to the wrong website.