If you’re a CloudFlare user then we’ve got some news for you.
We now have mod_cloudflare installed on all our Linux web servers.
What does this mean?
Why should you care?
If you’re using CloudFlare on your site then as far as the outside world is concerned your site appears to be hosted by them. That can cause some interesting issues.
With mod_cloudflare you’ll be able to:
- see users real IP addresses. The way CloudFlare works you’d normally just end up seeing CloudFlare IPs in your logs
- See how many people are accessing your site via IPv6. CloudFlare do IPv6 to IPv4, so even if your site is hosted on IPv4 only you’ll be able to see IPv6 visitors.
One of the other issues that led us to enabling mod_cloudflare was our network security. As you probably know websites and networks are under constant attack. While we’re not going to share the “secret sauce” of what we do to mitigate attacks hitting our servers suffice to say that we do end up blocking a lot of IP addresses and ranges. What we obviously don’t want to do is to accidentally block “good traffic” when we’re blocking the “bad” traffic. With mod_cloudflare we’re able to avoid accidentally blocking CloudFlare IP ranges from our network.
Any questions? Let us know!
About the Author: Michele Neylon
