How Do I Prevent External Client From Having An Internal IP?

Ruok2bu

I'm using OpenVPN to tunnel traffic to a web server (that's accesible by anyone on the internet) and i noticed a very troublesome issue: all client IPs are showing up as 10.0.0.1 instead of their actual IP address. Is there any way to get around this or is it an issue with OpenVPN ?

maikcat

do you perfoming NAT on your openvpn server?

Michael.

Ruok2bu

Yes, i have nat selected.

Ruok2bu

When i try enabling routing instead it tells me to set a route. What do i enter in that field?

Ruok2bu

Sorry to bump again, but the forum wont let me edit my previous post.

Turns out routing is enabled in the vpn settings, but my users were set to use nat so i changed them to use routing too, restarted the server and reconnected the server clients. It didnt fix it. Client (website visitor) ips are still displaying as 10.0.0.1

My VPS (it runs the OpenVPN server) runs OpenVZ, could that be the reason why?

Ruok2bu

I'm probably not explaining properly what's happening so here's a detailed description:

I'm using OpenVPN to reverse proxy traffic from a DDoS protected IP to my website server. Here's an image showing my topography:

So based in the above image lets say 4 people from various parts of the world are viewing my website. They aren't connected to OpenVPN but their IP addresses all display as 10.0.0.1 in my web server logs.

The only connection to OpenVPN is the Dedicated Web Server which uses an internal IP like 10.10.10.5

sean-tek

So effectively your open vpn server is a proxy towards the web server, not sure what your trying ot achieve is possible with openvpn previously I have either used HAproxy in transparent mode or set the webserver to log the x-forwarded-for header instead

Ruok2bu

sean-tek wroteSo effectively your open vpn server is a proxy towards the web server, not sure what your trying ot achieve is possible with openvpn previously I have either used HAproxy in transparent mode or set the webserver to log the x-forwarded-for header instead

It does work though. It's set up as a reverse proxy. An example of a common reverse proxy is using Nginx web server to reverse proxy traffic to Apache web server (eg. load balancer). In my case though, its just 1 to 1 traffic flow.