How to view request value in Apache http server submitted by user

Question

I am seeing an intermittent issues where the user request is not getting thru to the backend server which is weblogic directed from apache webserver. I would llike to see the request value in apache before redirection to weblogic. How do I see the user request values in apache?

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly, you are looking to log the entire http request from a client as it is received by Apache. There are a number of approaches to this issue:

• You can use a tool like tcpdump to take a packet trace, and then use strings to extract the text content of the packets. That would look something like this:

  • Grab the packets:

    # tcpdump -w packets -s 1500 port 80 and host <client ip address>
    

  • Display the results:

    # strings packets
    

  This isn't a perfect method (the output of strings will contain some garbage), but it's usually a good start.

• According to Google, recent versions of Apache have mod_dumpio, which "allows for the logging of all input received by Apache and/or all output sent by Apache to be logged (dumped) to the error.log file."

• I believe that mod_security can also log full requests.

Answer 2

You can use:

• a sniffer: ngrep 'GET|POST' port 80
• a tracer: strace <apache_worker>, ltrace <apache_worker>
• configure apache logs to log the content. Try to log only GETs.