The only significant piece of news in the new release is the addition of
one option. When pen is used to load balance web servers, requests from
the client are scanned and X-Forwarded-For headers added so the web
server can figure out the client's real address.
There are two things this can be used for:
1. Get logging right by replacing %h with %{X-Forwarded-For}i in the
LogFormat directive.
2. Do clever things with dynamic content that uses the client address.
The first is better done with penlog, as described in the HOWTO.
I've previously been reluctant to add protocol-specific stuff to pen, but
since load balancing web servers is arguably the most common application
it seems reasonable to compromise a little. And it was really quite a
small hack. ;-)
Anyway, now that the genie is out of the bottle, are there any other
useful ways too massage http headers? I can think of a few:
- Rewrite requests
- Remove headers (for protection against hackers)
- Send requests to different backend servers depending on the url
Ulric
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Feb 10 2003 - 01:25:58 CET