other/3391: REMOTE_HOST environment variable poorly documented and treated

[Felipe Carasso <hr...@rdc.puc-rio.br>]

>Number:         3391
>Category:       other
>Synopsis:       REMOTE_HOST environment variable poorly documented and treated
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Nov 12 09:50:00 PST 1998
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     hrimhari@rdc.puc-rio.br
>Organization:
apache
>Release:        1.3.3
>Environment:
AIX chywolf 2 4 000124A24C00
>Description:
  The REMOTE_HOST variable passed to CGIs on NCSA used to have the remote host
of a connection, or, if no host was available, the IP address.

  Newer versions of Apache has changed that to: REMOTE_HOST exists only if the-
re *is* a host to be informed. However, there's still no note about that in the
compatibility notes.

  I may be showing myself selfish, but a lot of CGIs created for NCSA uses the
REMOTE_HOST variable and they fail when it's not set,  as describbed  in  pre-
vious bug report(s).
>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:
  I'd like to suggest that the REMOTE_HOST would still acquire the IP  address
if there's no host name available, but the REMOTE_ADDR would still  exist.  It
would only be a matter of checking if REMOTE_HOST == REMOTE_ADDR  to  know  if
there *is* a host name or not... and Apache would retain a somewhat nice  com-
patibility with the old nice NCSA.
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:
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