Support

Please look at the bottom of this page (under Support Policy Summary) for our support policy summary, containing important information regarding our working hours and our support policy. Thank you!

I was just checking my admintools security exceptions log when I came across a strange situation. One IP address came up several times. When I blocked it, I was blocked out the website. It is not my IP address. So I disabled main.php and got back in and unblocked it. When I looked in my email that records admin logins, it shows this strange IP address for my recorded login IP.

OK, so I have been logging into several of my website today. All my logins were recorded by admintools to the same email. All the other logins are recorded in the email correctly. Only on this one website is it wrong.

So I uninstalled Admintools from this website and installed a clean new version. And the strange behavior continued same as before.

I really don' t know how this could be possible.

The setting that's different among your Admin Tools installations is in Web Application Firewall, Configure WAF, on the first tab, "IP Workarounds".

The IP you blocked is one of your host's servers. All of your traffic comes through that server before it hits your web server. It passes its own IP address and the IP address of the visitor to your web server. If the server is set up "backwards" the IPs are passed in the wrong order and Admin Tools blocks the server, not the visitor. IP Workarounds switches the order and corrects the problem.

I looked and IP Workarounds was set to yes. Should I set it to no?

Please explain in more detail what I should do to fix this recording error.

Thank you
Robin

Robin,

Your host has another server in front of your web server. It could be a Cloudflare server, CDN, load balancer, etc. It doesn't matter. All traffic hist that server first. That server then forwards the request to your web server. It sends along two IP addresses, its own address and the IP address of the visitor. There is a standard for how these two addresses should be sent, but MANY host set them up backwards. So Admin Tools picks up the server's address, not the visitor's.

IP Workarounds just switches the two addresses so Admin Tools gets the right one.

It is hard to tell how it should be set because it depends on how the first server sends the addresses. Admin Tools tries to guess how it is set up and set the IP Workarounds appropriately but sometimes it guesses wrong. And sometimes the host changes how the information is transferred. If you're seeing a single address in the Log, changing IP Workarounds is the answer.

Setting it to No recorded my IP correctly when I logged in. Thank you so much for the explanation.

You're welcome!