[Zope] Accessing site visitor's IP (solved!)

[Timothy Wilson]

Hi everyone,

I posted several weeks ago trying to determine if there was a definitive
method to retrieve the IP address of a visitor to my Web site. My real
motivation was simply to determine if the visitor was browsing from our LAN
or from outside our organization. A number of suggestions were made and
there was some disagreement about how useful such a thing would be and if it
was doable at all.

I'm glad to report that it is doable--at least for my purposes. I ended up
using an Apache module called mod_proxy_add_forward. This module adds an
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR header that contains the visitor's IP address even if
your Zope if running behind Apache. If your visitor is on a NAT'ed network
then you'll get the IP address of his or her proxy server.

This works perfectly for me and since this module is available as a Debian
package total installation time was less than one minute. (Gotta love
apt-get!)

I've written up a How-To at Zope.org describing it in more detail. It should
be available at http://www.zope.org/Members/TWilson/GettingVisitorsIP. I
would appreciate feedback on this How-To.

Thanks for all the suggestions that have been made on this topic in the past
couple weeks. They are very helpful. One final note: please don't use this
for controlling access to your site. IP addresses are too easily faked.

-Tim

--
Tim Wilson      |   Visit Sibley online:   | Check out:
Henry Sibley HS |  http://www.isd197.org   | http://www.zope.com
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wilson@visi.com |  <dtml-var pithy_quote>  | http://linux.com