IP Restrictions with Reverse Proxy

What is IP Restriction in Reverse Proxy?

Several requests are being sent to web servers on a continuous basis, and also there are countless reasons to keep web services protected. With IP restrictions, we can handle the requests that come to the server. IP restrictions monitor network traffic and, if it suspects a request originating from a particular IP address is suspicious, it will either block that IP address from accessing your web service or warn you to limit access to that IP address.

IP Restrictions allows you to give selective access to web servers based on the client’s IP address. The reverse proxy product sits right in front of the backend service. Thus, protecting it from direct access by clients spread throughout the world. When The IP restrictions is enabled, it allows the users to enter specific IP addresses that they want to either allow or restrict from accessing their server using the proxy link.

How does IP Restriction work at the client end?

Let’s begin, how this IP restrictions would work in a scenario where a client of the user, who has enabled IP Restrictions feature, wants to access the user’s server:

1. The client sends a request to the proxy link of the user’s server.
2. The IP address of the client making the request to the proxy link is fetched.
3. This IP address is compared with the list of IP addresses that the user has permitted or denied access to the proxy link.
4. If the IP address is allowed for that proxy link, the client will be able to access it; else, the client would be shown a ‘403 Forbidden’ error message.

How to enable the IP Restrictions?

• The user logs into the miniOrange Reverse Proxy Product.




• The user clicks on the “Proxy Settings” tab on the sidebar that directs him to the Proxy settings page. The “Proxy Settings” page has a “Add new proxy” button, clicking which, the user gets directed to a webpage where he gets to configure a new proxy link along with the features he wishes to enable.




• On the “Set Proxy” tab, the user enters the proxy link that he wishes to have for his server. Also, the user enters the server address of his server that will be pointed to by the aforementioned proxy link he entered.




• On the same page, the user switches to the “IP Restriction” feature’s tab. On that tab, he is prompted to enter as many IP addresses as he wants. Along with the option to add IP addresses, there lies a toggle switch that states whether the user wants to allow or restrict the IP addresses he entered. If the user switches the toggle “ON”, the entered IP addresses will be restricted from accessing the proxy link as their status is set to “restricted”. If the user leaves the toggle switch “OFF”, the entered IP addresses will be the only ones able to access the proxy link, as their status is set to “allowed”.




• The user saves the configurations.

These configurations are saved in the configuration file of the reverse proxy server. In this way, the users can restrict access to their web servers, making them more secure overall with IP restrictions.