Kurt's questions

We host many different domains and currently the certs live in a database. It's becoming increasingly tedious to get the certs out of there and into files just so nginx can load them.

It would be much nicer if we could something like the following:

server {
    server_name www.example.com;
    listen   443 ssl;

    ssl_certificate_key https://cert-distributor.acme.com/$host/server.key;
    ssl_certificate https://cert-distributor.acme.com/$host/server.crt;
...
}

Bonus points if the cert is cached in case cert-distributor.acme.com is down.

I currently have two pfsense boxes with a standard carp setup as per the docs, it works great.

Two part question here:

1. how does anything even work? My experience when accidentally having two ips on the same network has not been pleasant. So how does having a carp ip and a physical ip manage to coexist so harmoniously?

which feeds into the real question

2. should the pfsense boxes only have carp addresses for wan & lan and all communication/routing/whatever happen over the real sync ip address and nic?

ie: I'm proposing that the wan and lan do not have ips, only the sync nic has an ip, there will be a carp wan ip and carp lan ip

I'm trying to convert my bare metal Solaris 11 Express box into a virtual machine but I can't get it to boot.

I've already asked Is it possible to boot from a passthrough LSI 2008 SAS controller under VMware ESXi? but I suspect that it is impossible.

Therefore I've installed another instance of solaris on a virtual disk and got it to boot. But I really want to boot my existing OS as it has zones already configured, etc.

So here's my real question: what magic do I need to put into grubs menu.lst so that I can boot from a different disk? I've tried every combination of root, rootnoverify, and findroot that I could think of but grub can't seem to find that other disk.

Here's my current virtual menu.lst:

#rootnoverify /scsi_vhci/disk@g50014ee2b066ff9c
title Oracle Solaris 11 Express snv_151a
findroot (pool_rpool,0,a)
bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

#---------- ADDED BY BOOTADM - DO NOT EDIT ----------
title Virtual Oracle Solaris 11 Express snv_151a
findroot (pool_rpool1,0,a)
bootfs rpool1/ROOT/solaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive
#---------------------END BOOTADM--------------------

ps. I know I could mirror my real drive to the virtual drive but I consider that a last resort. My real drives are mirrored and much larger than my esxi datastore.

Kurt

I currently have Solaris 11 Express running on bare metal. I'd like to convert the machine to an ESXI host and run the existing os as a virtual machine.

I have ESXI setup, the virtual machine made, if I boot the vm from the recovery disk the drives and lsi2008 controller is visible. Everything looks like it should work, but the vm bios does not seem to try and boot from the controller.

Is this just impossible?