If you ever read my blog entry for setting up the Debian.org.tw, you probably already know that I love to use reverse proxy in the front of my web servers. This approach can solve the signal IP address for multiple Vservers problem, also it can provide web cache which reducing the server loading.

Since the proxy server (Squid) pass the http session to the real web servers, one of the problem is that my web servers always saw signal source IP address, which is the proxy’s IP address. Even through the proxy server still put the client’s IP in the `X-Forwarded-For’ http header, it’s still painful to retrieve the correct IP address from the head in every web application.

Thanks for Thomas Eibner, who wrote the reverse proxy add forward module for apache. The module simply check the IP address to see if it comes from the proxy server, if it is it will put the IP address in `X-Forwarded-Host’ or `X-Host’ to `Host’ header. So you don’t need to worry about the wrong IP address, and track the http requests more easily.

Debian package is ported by Piotr Roszatycki, but it’s still the old 0.5 version. Since the 0.6 is out, I filed a bugreport for remind him. For my etch servers, I back-ported the package with the last version. You can download it from my personal repository.

BTW, Piotr Roszatycki use yada for libapache2-mod-rpaf, who is also the maintainer of yada. After reading the yada’s script file `debian/packages’, I really feel like I went to my `good’ old days with RPM/specs. :p