thouvou's questions

we are in a special case where we have 2 Ubuntu offline servers in 2 DCs and should be kept offline when not used. When we need to use them, we power up one of them, do whatever we want physically via KVM and then power it off again. Network connectivity will be absent at any times. We need a way to easily replicate the changes in the 2nd offline server, so that they will have the same data every time. We came up with 3 candidate solutions:

1. 3-way ZFS mirror on the 1st server. Disc 1, remains attached. Disc 2, is kept in a safe. Disc 3, attached on the 2nd server. When operations are to be made on the 1st server, we plug disc 2 (from the safe), do the operation, unplug disk 2 from the mirror, plug in on the 2nd server and resilver. In short, the 3-way mirror will be always degraded on purpose. Alternatively, avoid plugging/unplugging disks and use ZFS send/receive snapshots stored in an external USB drive as snapshot file.
2. mdraid (sw raid 1) and do the same as in (1) (unplug-plug disc and resync).
3. Clonezilla (or any other 3rd party bare-metal solution) to image from the 1st server and apply in on the 2nd (the HW & partition setup will be identical).

Do you think that (1) would be too complex for a simple need like this? Any other opinions?

I've seen quite similar posts but not exactly what I'm looking for. I am trying to implement a nginx rewrite which should modify the content of a get variable. The result is always 404 not found and I cannot understand what is wrong. More specifically, I want:

https://mydomain.tld/resellers/view.php?id=1&url=https://market.tld to be rewritten to: https://resellers.mydomain.tld/view.php?id=1&url=101

So, there are 2 modifications:

1. mydomain changes to resellers.mydomain
2. url content changes to numeric

The config that I think should work is:

location ~ /resellers { 
rewrite ^/resellers/view.php?id=1&url=https://market.tld https://resellers.mydomain.tld/view.php?id=1&url=101;
}

Because there will be multiple combinations of links, regarding the id and url variables, would it be better to use rewrite maps? What I mean is that I want to be explicit when creating rules for the id and url variables and not use wildcards, as in more simple rewrite rules.

I hope that someone has been in a situation like this before, to shed some light. Thank you very much for your time.

I am working on a project where a new MS Exchange 2016 will be installed on a new server for a company. The company has already a working AD with 700 users and decided to buy and setup an Exchange server. Because I do not want to mess-up with the existing servers, I prefer to setup a new machine, join in to the AD, deploy Exchange etc.... I have read a few tutorials on this, I tested it in a virtual lab but I would like to know whether this setup is going to harm/modify something on the working AD. Has anyone deployed an Exchange server by joining the machine in an existing AD? Additionally, is there a better design concept instead of mine, when creating an Exchange for an existing AD? (e.g. create a new domain only for mail purposes_.

Thank you very much for your time.