FrancisV's questions

• I have grafana running on an EC2 instance on port 3000
• I created a target group called grafana-tg that redirects traffic to the target instances on port 3000
• Configured an ALB with the rule: if path matches /grafana then forward to the target group grafana-tg (also tried /grafana/ but still no dice)
• the root_url config in grafana.ini: root_url = %(protocol)s://%(domain)s:%(http_port)s/grafana/
• I can see the traffic hitting the grafana service but I'm getting this error message: msg="Request Completed" logger=context userId=0 orgId=0 uname= method=GET path=/grafana/ status=404 remote_addr=x.x.x.x time_ms=1 size=22164 referer=

I have this .htaccess file inside DOCUMENT_ROOT where it checks for the existence of a file, maintenance.enable and serves maintenance.html if it is present:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    # This portion checks for the presence of maintenance.enable to toggle
    # maintenance mode
    RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html -f
    RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.enable -f
    RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
    RewriteRule ^.*$ /maintenance.html [R=503,L]
    ErrorDocument 503 /maintenance.html
    Header Set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-store"

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

However, it doesn't seem to work outside DOCUMENT_ROOT. For example, considering I have a folder structure like this:

document_root/
  .htaccess
  index.php
  maintenance.html
  maintenance.enable
  test/
     .htaccess
     index.php
     maintenance.enable
     maintenance.html
outside_document_root/
   .htaccess
   index.php
   maintenance.html
   maintenance.enable

The folder outside_document_root is defined as an alias in the conf file.

My web root is in /staging/ and I'm currently using this rewrite line:

 location / {
            # This is cool because no php is touched for static content
            try_files $uri @rewrite;
    }

    location @rewrite {
            # Some modules enforce no slash (/) at the end of the URL
            # Else this rewrite block wouldn't be needed (GlobalRedirect)
            rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1;
    }

However, there are some links that are using URIs with "/staging/" so it gets rewritten twice:

/staging/staging/somefile.png

Can you help me fix my rewrite line so all URIs with the string "/staging/" should not be repeated? Thanks in advance!

We have around 1000 users in the Active Directory (on Windows 2008 R2) and we would like to batch update a field (student/employee ID number) from the school management system into their existing Active Directory accounts. Obviously, each student/employee ID is unique and needs to be matched to their current Active Directory account.

How can this be done? Is there a tool available for this purpose?

Our file server (Windows 2008 R2) is using iSCSI volumes for storage. When someone searches for a file in one of the shared drives, it takes an awful amount of time before the results come up and of course, it also impacts the overall performance of the server.

I installed Windows Search Service on the server but searching on Windows 7 or XP is still slow. It's fast on the server though, probably because of the index. How do I make the Windows 7/XP workstations benefit from the Windows Search Service index?

We're currently using 2 Windows 2008 R2 with DFS but discovered some issues with:

• replication of permissions (permissions are not replicated across DFS members)
• replication of quota (quota is disk-based)

Do these problems exist in clusters? Meaning, if we set the permission/quota on a folder in a member cluster, will all members of that cluster inherit the permission/quota? We will have a dedicated servers (HP P4300 Lefthand) and we plan to use it for the file servers as well. So, our choices are: DFS or fail-over cluster.

This Exchange 2003 server sits behind a firewall with a virtual SMTP server listening on port 465 and attached an SSL certificate from Comodo to the virtual server. However, when trying to send from Apple Mail.app 4.x and Outlook 2011 for Mac, it never completes the connection (time out). Oddly though, the same setup works with Thunderbird. My question is:

• Does it matter if the friendly name of the certificate is different from the internal hostname? The machine has 2 hostnames: external and internal. The official SSL is using the external name.
• When using a self-signed certificate with the same name as the internal, I still can't send from the Mail.app and Exchange clients but I can with Thunderbird.

I have more than 50 Macs on the network and I think it's time to put some controls in place so I'm scouting for ways to integrate the Mac OS X clients into Active Directory. The primary objective is to enforce GPOs from the AD to the Mac OS X clients. I'm thinking of the following solutions:

• Use Mac OS X Server's Directory Service with AD
• Use a third-party solution like Centrify's DirectControl or Thursby's ADmitMac

Which of the solutions do you think is the best way to go?

I have a Postfix server filtering emails for an Exchange 2003 server. From the firewall, all incoming emails are routed through Postfix, gets filtered before it is delivered to the Exchange 2003 server. All outbound emails are relayed to the Exchange server first and then it gets relayed to the Postfix server then out to the internet.

Inside the network, I have Outlook clients connecting to the Exchange server via MAPI.

However, I have some users who are outside the network and are using the Exchange server to send out emails via port 25 (NAT redirection). These users use Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and various mobile devices. I want to change this to a non-standard port (e.g. 465) and use TLS/SSL to secure the communication between end-client and the server. How do I do this without changing any configuration for the users inside the network?

How do I make apt-get ignore some dependencies? For example, I wanted to install mailx so I can use it to send email from cron scripts/report-generating tools. However, installing mailx also installs exim4 and a whole bunch of dependencies (I already have Postfix installed) I don't really need and which I guess mailx can also live without.

How do I ignore some dependencies but still use apt-get since it's a nice tool?

How is disk quota treated in a DFS environment? Do quotas also get replicated to member servers? How do you setup quotas and file screening for this kind of environment? I'd like to know your experiences in setting this up.

Has anyone successfully used AD authentication using the latest version of FreeNAS with Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers? I wanted to use FreeNAS to host files and share them via CIFS but I couldn't make FreeNAS authenticate with a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller. Ultimately, the new CIFS shares will be referenced in the DFS namespace that we already have running on Windows 2008 R2 servers.

Any tip you can share with me?

Initially, we placed the DFS function on the 2 domain controllers but the login times are getting longer/slower and the CPU/memory resources on the 2 domain controllers are almost flatline during peak hours where a lot of users are reading and writing files on the servers. To mitigate this, we plan to deploy 2 new domain controllers, demote the 2 old domain controllers and leave the DFS function on the old servers.

I know that a domain namespace is highly dependent on Active Directory -- is there going to be a performance issue if we split the DFS function from the domain controllers? Is our plan the best approach or is there a better one?

I'm currently planning to purchase a server for our MySQL database. I'm deciding whether to get an Intel 2 x quad core Core2Duo processor or 2 x dual core Xeon. Any feedback will be appreciated.