Voting mechanism with IP validation and allowing only one by user: problem in getting user IP address with two app servers and apache in front.

Question

Hi there.

We have a voting mechanism that we want to restrict to only allow one vote by user.

We've tried to validate by IP address, but the problem is that when we get the user's IP address in the applicational server it shows always the apache IP address (we have two applicational servers with apache in front of them).

We are using ColdFusion variable CGI.REMOTE_ADDR to get the user IP.

Anyone knows how to fix this?

We would like to avoid the use of sessions or cookies.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You probably want to use the X-Forward-For header header
instead of the source ip, assuming you're apache instances are putting it into the request.