Help with IP Detection when using SSL

Wed Dec 4 12:52:04 CET 2013

Hi I have a very strange issue and the hosting company is telling me its 
not possible I am hoping you guys can help.

I have a nginx / varnish which acts as a load balancer and cache sitting 
in front of my webservers. My web servers are standard apache web servers.

I am having problems with detecting the genuine IP address of users 
connecting to the system. The $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] shows the IP 
address of the load balancer/cache and not of the user visiting the site.

We have written a hack so that with HTTP traffic we send through an 
X-Forwarded-For header with the correct IP address, but I have been told 
this is not possible with SSL.

Unfortunately due to strict security requirements we are not able to 
offload SSL onto the load balancer/cache it has to go to apache.

Has anyone got any ideas on how we could detect the IP address, when 
using SSL?

(I have also posted this on stackoverflow, feel free to reply to either, 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20349943/varnish-nginx-ssl-ip-detection-issue) 

many thanks,
Simon
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*Simon Lennon*
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