I’ve switched from a single www-server design to the Pound approach. One of my first problems to solve was how to get the real IP from the requesting host.

When apache is serving requests behind the loadbalancer is sees only the IP of the requesting loadbalancer pound that is acting like a reverseproxy. Because I used the default logformat “combined” I only saw the IP of the Pound box but no IP from the real host that made the request.

As a result my awstats setup lost information about unique users and visits. No clickstreams could be analised anymore because all requests appeard to be originated from one single IP.

My solution to get back the lost information without changing the awstats setup was to add the following LogFormat to the apache config that I now use for my logfiles.

LogFormat “\”%{X-Forwarded-for}i\” %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\” \”%{forensic-id}n\”” poundcombined

Awstats is happy with the output and I’m happy with having my lost information back.

On big “Thank-You” to the pound-mailinglist for their helping hands.

This AWStats-Logfile-Analysis shows the problem: The column “Anzahl der Besuche” (Visits) reports only one visitor after switching to pound. With the fix installed on 23.02.2005 the results return to normal state.