Peter Howe's questions

I have a site using the standard nginx approach for directing traffic via /index.php regardless of url:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
}

But I want to use a different php-fpm pool for a certain URL (but still going via /index.php). I could, I presume, use an "if" clause within the .php$ location block to use a different fastcgi_pass depending on the URL, but "if" is discouraged so is there another way?

Is there any reason (security, performance, etc.) that I should not use .htaccess in an Apache production/live environment?

I am running two servers and wish to mount a directory on one from the other. For various reasons, I wish to use Samba (smbfs) rather than NFS.

ServerA mounts ServerB with this in the fstab:

//ServerB/sambashare /mount/point smbfs username=blah,password=blah,ro

This works, and I can see the contents of sambashare in /mount/point. However, a symlink in that directory which, on Server A, points at /tmp/blah is not resolving correctly. If I try to go into the directory, it says Permission denied.

The Samba server on ServerB has the following global settings:

follow symlinks = yes
wide links = yes

Any suggestions on why this may not be working? The link does resolve correctly locally on ServerB.

(The names of servers, shares, etc. have been changed to protect the innocent.)

We currently use svn and, through the user of hooks, are able to ensure that every commit message is prefixed by a bug-number (which ties those commits to a problem report in our Bugzilla issue tracker.)

We wish to move to mercurial with all of its distributed goodness. But one of the benefits of hg is that developers wouldn't necessarily need to to be online to commit changes, so we don't want hook scripts validating bug numbers against our central Bugzilla resource.

I may be coming at this from an svn perspective too much, but what I think I want is for developers to be able to specify a bug number at the time when the developer decides to push their change to a central testing repo. The key requirement here is that we want to be able to tie back commits to a Bugzilla bug, but we don't want to give developers a complex and manual workflow (which the Attic extension, for example, seems to impose.)

Any ideas?

I work for a small company (around 40 people) and our email is available via IMAP - but only when connected to our VPN. For iPhone users (and generally), the VPN connection appears to be an unnecessary overhead - after all, the IMAP traffic is encrypted and password-protected, so should I have any hesitations about opening up the IMAP SSL traffic to the internet?

(I can imagine greater concern for SMTP traffic perhaps - though, again, if encrypted and password protected, am I being overcautious?)