reverse proxy authentication header is processed by confluence

Question

Hello,
we have a confluence 3.5 installation that works fine, if accessed directly; login via html form.

We are now trying to access it via apache reverse proxy. We would like login for confluence to be independent (via html form) from the login to reverse proxy (basic auth). What happens, though, is that confluence is trying to process (unsuccessfully) the basic auth header from the reverse proxy, and the user gets 401. In confluence log I see these messages:

2011-07-08 15:33:18,582 INFO [http-8081-30] [confluence.security.login.DefaultLoginManager] onFailedLoginAttempt 
Failed login attempt for user 'user1@unhcr.org': 
Request URL: http://10.9.36.50:8081/confluence/ 
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Remote Address: 193.134.136.78
X-Forwarded-For: 193.134.136.246

We don't want to touch anything in the reverse proxy, or tomcat (as there are other applications running under it); is it possible to do something inside the confluence installation to force it to ignore the authentication request from the reverse proxy?

Thanks,
Leo.

BCCHR IT · Answer

This is super freaking old thread, but for anyone else who's come here with this issue. The work around is to unset the Authorization header when using Apache2 as a reverse proxy. RequestHeader unset Authorization The same can be done with NGiNX proxy_set_header Authorization ""; This works great and solves the issue. However, if your confluence installation allows anonymous access, and the authentication used with NGiNX/Apache2 isn't the same as Confluence. You'll run into pop-ups for specific elements. For instance the following link "rest/mywork/latest/status/notification/new"

401

Client must be authenticated to access this resource.

twong_atlassian · Answer

Could you simply use mod_headers in the vhost definition to strip the auth header before processing the proxy pass?

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_headers.html