On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 13:32 +0100, Jean-Pierre van Melis wrote:
> Robert,
> 
> First off I want to thank you for pound which makes it possible for me to run 
> several webservers on a consumer DSL-line. 
> 
> In the past I expressed my wish to make pound (optionally) truly transparent 
> using TPROXY. There are more people who would like to have this transparency. 
> One of them is Mr. Ivancso Krisztian ([email protected]) who even successfully 
> wrote a patch for pound http://poundtp.freeweb.hu/.
> I would really like to have this incorporated in the mainline code and I 
> believe Mr. Ivancso Krisztian would even be honoured if you did.
> 
> I never heard any reaction from you, the author of Pound, which leaves us a 
> bit in the dark. Could you please clear this up? A "no" is of course an 
> option too. If you also give us a reason would be better and a "I'm already 
> working on it" is of course the thing we would really like to hear ;-)
> 
> I believe the TPROXY method is not cross-platform but this can be easily 
> solved using compiler directives...
> The code will be simply ignored on the other platforms...
> 
> Anyway....
> Thanks for developing and maintaining pound

First of all: thanks for the kind words.

Now to the subject matter: I looked at the proposed patch and I can't
see that we'll adopt it. Here is our reasoning:

Benefit(s):
- the back-end sees the true originating IP address.

Disadvantages:
- not portable, single system (Linux only)
- very specific setup: the gateway must also be the Pound server. In
most cases that is not done - you usually have a gateway that does port
forwarding.
- software complexity: additional code is never healthy
- set-up complexity: Pound is dependent on netfilter being present,
correctly configured, with no conflicts

Seeing that the only benefit is that the logs would work with the IP
address rather than the X-Forwarded-for header (which can be configured
in practically all Web servers I know of), I don't think that this is
worth it.

I am aware that you put work into this, and, if you feel this is
important, I would be happy to add a link to the patch on the Pound
site, so people can easily find it.

In the meantime I hope we could concentrate on getting the 2.5 release
out.
-- 
Robert Segall
Apsis GmbH
Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707
Tel: +41-44-920 4904


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