Tag Archives: apache

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Add x-forwarded-for header to Apache

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If you happen to be running your site behind a web application firewall you will notice that initially you will not be able to determine the true source of traffic coming to your server. The default setup for Apache will only show traffic coming from the firewall itself.

To fix this, you need to tweak the LogFormat parameters in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (for Debian distros) or wherever your apache config file is in other distros. Per here, you need to add

 %{X-Forwarded-For}i

to your config file. Here is an example setup successfully implementing X forwarded For as well as maintaining logging the IP of the WAF itself (in case you have more than one..)

LogFormat "%v:%p %{X-Forwarded-For}i %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vhost_combined
LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O" common
LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer
LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent
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Fix Apache “Could not reliably determine name” error

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For too many years now I have been too lazy to investigate the Apache error message I get whenever I restart the service:

 ... waiting apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

I finally decided to investigate it today and found this post which describes a simple fix: create /etc/apache2/conf.d/name and add the ServerName variable to it.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/conf.d/name
ServerName jeppson.org

Change ServerName to be whatever you would like, and you’re good to go.

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Fix subsonic after 5.0 upgrade

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Subsonic is a great media streaming program that I’ve used for a few years now. It was originally designed for streaming your private music collection but has since moved to allowing you to stream your video collection as well. It’s great for those of us who can’t bring their entire audio/visual library with them but would still like access to said library wherever they are.

I run subsonic behind an apache reverse proxy configuration similar to this one to allow it to run on the same server as other websites over port 80 and allow for HTTPS (When I set up my subsonic server years ago it had no native support for HTTPS.  The only way to have HTTPS was through another web server such as apache.)

After downloading and installing the Subsonic 5.0 upgrade I ran into a couple of issues, detailed below.

Issue #1

I have experienced several times over the years – upgrading causes /etc/default/subsonic to be replaced with a default, clean version. This is a problem if you have a few customizations to your subsonic setup, in my case context-path and port. (My experience is with Debian. I don’t know if other distros perform in a similar manner or not)

Resolution

Before you upgrade subsonic, make a backup copy of /etc/default/subsonic, then restore that copy after upgrade. If you forgot to make a backup first, edit the new /etc/default/subsonic file and check the following

  • Make sure the –port and –https-port arguments are correct
  • Re-add –context-path if you had it configured before. In my setup, I have configured –context-path=/subsonic to make my apache rewrite rules easier to manage.

Issue #2

The video streaming function broke entirely. This was due to the fact that it was trying to reference a local IP address to stream the videos, despite my apache proxypass rule. This problem will only surface itself if you are running Subsonic behind a reverse proxy.

Resolution

After a few days of searching I finally came across this helpful post. To get video to work, simply add

 ProxyPreserveHost on

to the apache configuration file you used for your reverse proxy, then restart apache. This will fix the video streaming function but you will notice your HTTPS icon change (if you configured HTTPS), notifying you that some content on the page is not encrypted. This is due to subsonic streaming the video in plain HTTP instead of HTTPS.

Unfortunately the fix to that appears to require at least Apache 2.4.5. Since I have an earlier version, I was greeted with this lovely message:

Syntax error on line 15 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/subsonic:
Invalid command 'SSLProxyCheckPeerName', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Since I did not want to upgrade my version of apache, I simply decided to accept the risk of my video streams possibly being intercepted.

Success.

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Changing permalink structure in WordPress

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After installing a fresh installation of WordPress on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) I decided to change the new site’s permalink structure. The default structure on WordPress is so boring and uninformative  – sitename/?p=(number). I prefer the blogger method – sitename/year/month/postname.

Changing the structure should be pretty straightforward; However, when I clicked that option and clicked save, every post greeted me with a wonderful 404 error page.

Screenshot from 2014-08-01 20:33:54

If you are running apache it turns out there are a few extra things you need to do that aren’t mentioned in WordPress’s 5 minute install guide. Detailed instructions are found here.

  1. Enable the mod-rewrite apache plugin
  2. Ensure the directory of your wordpress installation has a Directory entry and that AllowOverride All is enabled
  3. Restart apache

After this, everything worked. The reason behind needing this change is WordPress modifies the .htaccess file for its installation folder with a simple rule:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

All it does is transparently prepend index.php to any web request it receives. Index.php is smart enough to direct pages wherever it needs to after that. If you don’t want to mess with enabling mod_rewrite, you can simply change your site structure to have /index.php/ before everything else. It will accomplish the same thing, only now index.php will show up in all your site URLs.