Yesterday, there was a thread on hacker news highlighting that many sites around the world were making available potentially sensitive information about their site via Apache’s server-status link (provided by mod-status).

The stated advice is to limit access to this and similar pages (such as the server info page provided by mod-info) by using Allow/Deny to limit access to requests from the local machine, thus:

<Location /server-status>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1 ::1
</Location>

Many distributions have this as the default configuration, but beware!

If you run Squid in a reverse proxy configuration, which many sites including this one do to improve performance under high load, you can easily expose such pages.

A common reverse proxy configuration is to run Squid on the local machine “in front” of Apache by configuring Squid to listen to port 80 and relaying to a local Apache server (which is bound to a different port). Under this configuration all requests to Apache will appear to be local, originating from the local machine.

Without extra steps being taken (such as using Squid ACLs) you could quite easily expose sensitive information you thought was only available to your local admins.

Beware!