web.xml frequently being deleted from Tomcat Manager servlet

Question

The tomcat I used is: apache-tomcat-7.0.55. The web.xml is deleted / disappear from the Tomcat Manager servlet frequenly.

Usually, I put a copy of web.xml to $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/manager/WEB-INF and restart the tomcat to make this servlet accessible from "xxx:8080/manager". However, after maybe 24 hours, the web.xml disappears agian.

Does anyone have any clue on this? Because I've got three servers and all these three servers have this problem.

Answer 1

Now I finally find out the problem. In my case, it's not a common one.

For developers (normally Chinese developers) who are using Aliyun VPS, the Aliyun service will setup a scanning process for checking if your server has potential bugs or risk. And "web.xml" is one of the risk. So this process will try to delete your web.xml file!

I fixed this issue firstly by setting the privileges of this file to read-only. But after I known the real cause, I killed this process and remove this service on AliCloud Web Console.