x-forwarded-for in https headers on IIS

Question

So we have a site that sits behind a proxy and we were trying to use the x-forwarded-for header for logging purposes. We then quickly noticed that x-forwarded-for is not in the https header information. Can anyone explain if or how you can get this into the https header on IIS 7?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You need to offload/terminate SSL on the load balancer. Since the communication is over an encrypted tunnel in SSL, the load balancer cannot see or modify the headers. Once SSL terminates at the load balancer it add the header as it is for http. It can then re-establish the SSL tunnel back to the client if that is a requirement.