Taylor Jasko's questions

I'd like to add some more IPs to my single ESXi server that I have through a hosting provider. When the server was set it up, I was given a /29 and was left with five IPs to use. But, there's something baffling me on how I would add more IPs.

My server only has one NIC, and from what I understand, one NIC can only be assigned one gateway at a time (the new IPs would have a different gateway). I asked my data center on how this would work, and they simply responded that the new IPs would be on the same private VLAN that I am on right now and I could set it up in the OS config. But, how does having the new IPs in the same VLAN make a difference? I set up pfSense (which is a virtual machine and all the VMs route through it using NAT 1:1) to have the gateway on my first range of IPs. So wouldn't pfSesne need a whole new interface/WAN to even add these IPs?

I'm obviously missing something but I have no idea what it is...

pfSense config for the static WAN interface (the IP is a public IP, so I blanked it out):

It'll probably help to mention that then to assign signle IPs off to my VMs, all I do is add in the IP as an alias, and it works. But I see that it allows me to add an IP in a completely different subnet, so maybe all I need to do is just add in the new IPs here and not even touch anything else as it's all on the same VLAN?

The title says it all, but I have a very interesting problem that I am quite confused on. Basically, I have a simple WordPress installation, and I wish to deny a folder (along with all files in the folder), let's say /wp-content/themes/default/scripts but to allow certain IPs.

I can deny this folder with location ^~/wp-content/themes/default/scripts {deny all;} like any Nginx guru will tell you.

But from my understanding, the "^" takes higher precedence and will stop searching for other location blocks once it finds the regex match. As I do not want to deny the folder for everyone (of course, using allow (IP Address);, my ^~/wp-content/... location block entirely whipes out my PHP-FPM location block to pass the file over to the FastCGI server. And of course, when I try to view any file in the folder, the PHP file is directly downloaded as PHP is not parsing it.

Does anyone have an idea? I want to block the folder, but for PHP to work at the same time for the users I decide to allow. It is quite the tricky question; I cannot find any answer to the problem.

Thanks guys! Really appreciate your help!

For anyone wondering, my current Nginx vhost config looks like the following:

server {
    #..all of the common stuff you would expect

    include /folder/nginx.conf; #including some WordPress rewrites for W3 Total Cache

    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on UNIX socket
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 1900;
    }

    location / {
        #allowing some IPs...

        #deny everyone else
        deny all;

        #WordPress rewrite for slugs
        index index.php;
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^(.*)$  /index.php last;
        }

        #rewrite for sitemaps
        rewrite ^(.*/)?sitemap.xml /wp-content/sitemap.php last;

    }

    # denying access to .htaccess files
    location ~ /\.ht {
            deny  all;
    }
}