mod_remoteip backport for Apache HTTPD 2.2

Apache HTTPD 2.4 has a very useful new feature for large deployments: Replacing the remote IP of a request from a request header, e.g. set by a load balancer or reverse proxy. Users of Apache HTTPD 2.2 as found on RHEL6 can now use the backport found on https://github.com/ImmobilienScout24/mod_remoteip-httpd22.

I pulled this backport together from various sources found on the Internet and "it seems to work". Working with C code (which I did not do for 14 years!) tought me again the value of test driven development and modern programming languages. Unfortunately I still can't explain a change like this without a lot of thinking:

You can easily build an RPM from the code on GitHub. The commit history shows the steps I had to undertake to get there. Configuration is as simple as this:


LoadModule remoteip_module modules/mod_remoteip.so
RemoteIPHeader X-Forwarded-For
RemoteIPInternalProxy 10.100.15.33

with the result that a reverse proxy on 10.100.15.33 can set the X-Forwarded-For header. Apache configuration like Allow From can then use the regular client IP even though the client does not talk directly to the web server.