eckza's questions

Some of the customers of the e-commerce website that I manage are behind a ZScaler firewall, and it appends garbage query params to all outgoing requests; so when my website makes a HTTP GET request like:

/api/cartinventoryitems?cartsummaryid=eq.1234

It comes through to nginx as:

/api/cartinventoryitems?cartsummaryid=eq.1234&_sm_byp=iVVJvVj6nqJDqQj5

The endpoint behind my /api/ location does not like this, so I am trying to strip it out.

Right now, I am trying to use rewrite at the head of my server block, like so:

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        rewrite ^(.*)([&?]_sm_byp=\w+) $1 last;
        ...
}

But it doesn't seem to be working. Any help would be appreciated.

I have a single Windows Server 2008 R2 box that's on a generic Geek Squad battery backup. (That purchase was not my choice.) It shuts down fine when the battery hits a critical level, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to boot back up when the power comes back on. I tried to follow the instructions as outlined here - http://wiert.me/2010/06/24/using-a-usb-connected-apc-ups-with-windows-server-2008-and-vmware-server-2-0/ - but when I go into the Device Manager and open the properties for the HID UPS Battery device, I get no Power Management tab, so I don't see an option anywhere to allow the device to wake the computer.

Any ideas?

This one really has me stumped.

I've got a Windows Server 2008 R2 box that I administrate over RDP on a regular basis with no problems whatsoever. Today, I decided to try to set it up as a domain controller, so I added the Active Directory Domain Services role.

I set everything up with dcpromo.exe. Here's my dcpromo.exe unattend file:

; DCPROMO unattend file (automatically generated by dcpromo)
; Usage:
;   dcpromo.exe /unattend:C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\ActiveDirectoryConfig.txt
;
[DCInstall]
; New forest promotion
ReplicaOrNewDomain=Domain
NewDomain=Forest
NewDomainDNSName=xxxxx.local
ForestLevel=4
DomainNetbiosName=XXXXX
DomainLevel=4
InstallDNS=Yes
ConfirmGc=Yes
CreateDNSDelegation=No
DatabasePath="C:\Windows\NTDS"
LogPath="C:\Windows\NTDS"
SYSVOLPath="C:\Windows\SYSVOL"
; Set SafeModeAdminPassword to the correct value prior to using the unattend file
SafeModeAdminPassword=
; Run-time flags (optional)
; RebootOnCompletion=Yes

I rebooted, then tried to open Active Directory Administrative Center - and I just get an empty window. It's like it's not drawing it properly onscreen. Within the RDP client I changed the color depth to 32 bit from 16 bit - no change. Tried to disconnect from RDP then reconnect - no change. Everything else works great and displays as it should, and I don't have physical access to this box so I can't plug in a monitor.

Any idea what's going on?

The small business that I do sysadmin work for on the side uses a mid-2011 Mac Mini Server (running 10.7 Lion) as a fileserver and FileMaker database host. Its 2 750gb HDDs are RAID 1'd together, and it Time Machine backups over USB to a RAID 1 array of 2 1 TB disks.

I set it up about a year and a half ago and had no problems with it until a few months ago. I opened Disk Utility to find that the RAID had degraded and that it was only running on one disk. I went out and bought another 750gb HDD, installed it, and rebuilt the array.

Everything was fine for a week - then, the array degraded again. I rebuilt the array and it was fine again until last week - when again, the array degraded. It keeps degrading on the same device - disk1 has always been fine, but disk2 keeps degrading, regardless of what physical hard drive is in there. I don't think it's a hardware issue.

What should I do? I would reinstall OSX, but I've never restored a backup from Time Machine before and I'm not sure what to expect - if things go sideways, I woud have to reconfigure a lot of stuff, including about 10 user accounts and network shares and stuff (not to mention the FileMaker configuration stuff). This is just a side thing for me, and I really don't want to burn up a Friday-night-to-Monday-morning-nonstop weekend scenario on this because something went wrong and I lost everything.

Here's my setup: I have one Mac Mini Server running OSX 10.7 Server set up as my network's primary file server. (I just finished installing it yesterday afternoon.) It shares files to 10 or so computers running Windows 7. So far, I have:

• Created user accounts on the OSX machine with the same credentials as on Windows
• Set them as Sharing Accounts
• Created a group for the users
• Shared several folders (all subfolders of /Shared Items) to the group with read & write permission
• Mapped the shared folders as network drives on all the Windows machines

Everything was working just great - until one user (who happened to be my boss) tried to save a file on the public directory and access it from another machine. He got a 'permission denied' error. I popped open Terminal and checked, and the directory was set to drwx------, and all the files in the directory were set to -rwx------.

To keep things moving along until I figure out what's going on, I enabled the root user and made a crontab to chmod -Rv 777 the /Shared Items directory once a minute, but it's a dirty hack and I don't like it.

Everything was configured through the Settings GUI in OSX. smb is enabled and is being used. What am I doing wrong, and how can I fix this?

I've developed a small Rails app that I need to run on my local network. I got Apache2 and Phusion Passenger set up, and the app is running on the server at http://myapp.dev, but I am not sure how to set it up so that I can access the app from any computer on the network. I know that if I had it running on rails server with WebBrick, that I could reach the app from any computer by visiting 192.168.0.141:3000 (with 192.168.0.141 being my IP, of course). I want this type of functionality from my current setup.

Here's my VirtualHost configuration from my httpd.conf:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName myapp.dev
    DocumentRoot "/webapps/myapp/public"
    <Directory "/webapps/myapp/public">
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Here's a screengrab of my Server Admin settings:

Everything else is default - I just set this up yesterday, and I really don't know how to configure it all that well yet.

I'm doing some Rails dev, and I'm trying to get Pow running. After making the appropriate symlink, if I try to go to idealm_web.dev/ (idealm_web being the name of my Rails project), I get this:

I was told that this was Apache. How do I disable this? I checked under System Preferences > Sharing, and there was no way to disable it.

[Cross-posted from AskDifferent, here. Are we allowed to do this?]

EDIT: Here is a screengrab of System Preferences > Sharing. I don't see Web Sharing anywhere, and this is where OSX pointed me when I typed in 'web sharing' in Spotlight.

Within the next month or two, we're going to be getting brand-new computers at my office, and it's going to be my responsibility to set them up and network them. I've not messed with networking under Windows 7 all that much (or networking in generally, really), so I'm wondering this: Would it be possible to set all the computers up on the network so that all personal files and folders would be stored on a network drive? What would be the best plan of attack for setting up this network? We've only got about 15 machines total.

In this question, I outlined the situation at my workplace regarding some of the office workers' children and the computers that we've provided for them to use. Long story short, it turned out that they had fallen into the habit of clicking on every flashy banner that said "FREE GAMES JUST INSTALL THIS MALWARE", so I switched them to Limited accounts.

Well, I recently came across some of my old PC games from when I was their age, and they've made it quite clear to me that they would be extremely interested in playing them. However, the games in question (mostly LEGO Media titles) won't run correctly on a Limited account. I don't want to give them full administrative access because they'll definitely get bored and start installing crap again, so is there any way that I can restrict them only from running installers?

I need daily notifications of whether or not my crontabs completed successfully. I've read a few things about setting cron to send out email notifications, but I'm wondering... how do I know if my Linux box is set up with a mail server? If it's not, how can I do this? The systems in question are running Ubuntu 10.10, SME Server 7.4, and OS X Server 10.6.7.

Complete and detailed answers would be great, but I'm really just looking for a shove in the right direction.

On occasion, some of my coworkers feel compelled to bring their children to work with them. (I feel compelled to smack them, but that's probably a topic for Parenting.SE.) To ensure that the brats^H^H^H^H^H children stay out of everyone's way, my boss had me set up a few older computers in the breakroom for them to play on. To ensure that they wouldn't be able to Ruin Everything, I wired a 4-port ethernet hub into one of the empty ports on the back of our cable modem, and put the "fun" computers on their own subnet. This way, they have internet access, but they're not part of our network. (At least, that's what I'm counting on.)

We've been using this setup for about a month or so, and the mighty power of Facebook has been keeping the kids (more or less) out of our hair. Well, tonight, while I was doing some routine maintenance on all the systems, I decided to see what the kids had been up to. Apparently, they've taken it upon themselves to snag every piece of sketchy malware that the Internet's ever been home to. I set passwords on the systems (so that they can't get on until I sort things out) and shut them down, but all of a sudden I'm pretty worried now - is there any way for those systems to access our internal network? Also, I'm a little concerned that they may have gotten some stuff that could be getting their personal information.

Obviously, my next step is going to be cleaning the computers out and giving them limited-user-only access, but I'm wondering - were the systems ever a threat to our network?

In case I wasn't clear enough earlier, here's a quick diagram:

     |
     |
     |
 Internet
     V
     |
     |
 |Cable Modem|
     |  L___________________
     |                     |
     |                |4-port switch|
     |                     |
|Router/DHCP Server|       |
| / Firewall       | [Kids' Computers]
     |
     |
|Network Switch|
     |
     |
[Rest of Network]

Thanks for any input.

DISCLAIMER: I like kids. I really do. I just hate interruptions and yelling, and I think that's perfectly reasonable.

I need to drop another hard drive into my company's SME Server-powered fileserver and figure out a way to do a nightly clone backup of the entire filesystem so that, if the hard drive fails, I can just drop in the clone and be on my way. I'm basically looking for something that can perform a dd, but with the filesystem being live.

Any suggestions?

Related to this but different enough so that I think it deserves its own question.

I'm the sysadmin of a small business, and by 'sysadmin', I mean 'by the seat of my pants' (still in university, not a lot of real-world experience, etc). I'm not ignorant, just inexperienced.

Anyway - we've got about 10 office employees whose computer usage consists mostly of using a web browser, pulling up Word occasionally, and interacting with our company's database through FileMaker. Our current batch of workstations are 5-year-old Dell E520s that literally never get shut down. I'm not worried about hard drives failing - by and large, most important files are saved on a networked drive - the big deal is just plain old energy efficiency. We're a small business, and I wrack my brains every day trying to figure out ways to shave a few dollars here and there from our overhead, and shutting the workstations down at 5p and firing them all back up at 9a seems like an easy way to do that (not to mention the tangible performance benefits that come from restarting Windows XP, as opposed to letting 10 tabs of FireFox leak memory all night long :P).

This may be an extremely stupid question, but what do you all think?

Right now, in my office, we have a Cradlepoint MBR1000 wireless router as our DHCP server. It's not as configurable as I'd like for it to be, and I need to set up a VPN, so I am considering replacing it with a dedicated box running Zeroshell.

I'm wondering this: If I set this system up and make it our DHCP server, will it re-assign all the IP addresses at random (or in an otherwise different fashion than they already are)? What determines what IP address a device gets from the DHCP server? I've got some scripts and crontabs set up that depend on things being exactly as they are, so I'm a little nervous about changing anything so substantial.

I've got (what I believe to be) a fresh installation of Server 2003 R2 (SP1), and while I've got perfect LAN connectivity, I can't access the Internet. I've tried pinging websites through Command Prompt, and I still get nothing. I've never used Server 2003 before, so I've got no idea what to look for. This box is plugged into the same switch as the computer that I'm typing this up on, so I know it's not that.

I checked, and I don't think that this is a dupe of this question, as I am about 99% sure that someone installed Server 2003 on this box then never used it - I doubt that it ever had internet connectivity to begin with.

EDIT: Apparently, I've got basic network connectivity now... I can ping the router at 192.168.0.1, but I still can't connect to the internet.