awicz

Holy smokes this is embarrassing!

So somehow, I had a duplicate installation of WordPress on this brand new server of mine. The files that I had been changing permissions on, where not the files apache was serving. I deleted the entire wordpress directory, yet the site was still up :/

Always something simple. Thanks for leading me in the right direction ashiquzzaman.

Thanks for your response.

Yes, I have all plugins disabled. I just tried changing the theme to back to the default TwentySixteen. No change.

I should also mention that I have been rebooting the VM every time I changed permissions, and this last attempt at changing themes.

Given that this is a new installation, I agree it would be easy to just hit the reset button. But, my intention was to use WordPress in a production environment. If there is an issue, even one that cannot be readily fixed, I would prefer to know that is the fact rather than be hunting issues down once an install has been populated with user data.

Thanks again, further suggestions would be very welcome.