Mongrel Debugging

Here are some tips to debug Mongrel if you're attempting to work with additional SSL Front-End Proxies:

Author: Jeff McCune <jeff@northstarlabs.net>

Working SSL Reverse Proxies

• Apache and Mongrel
• Pound and Mongrel

Untested SSL Reverse Proxies

• lighttpd
• nginx
• Pen
• Add more here ...

Protocol Layer Debugging

To get a nice packet capture on the loopback interface:

tcpdump -w /var/tmp/mongrel.cap -i lo -nnvvXSs 16500 tcp and port 38140

Then, WireShark (Formerly ethereal) is a great way to analyze the headers coming to/from Mongrel from the reverse proxy.

Since the reverse proxy does SSL decryption, our HTTP stream is in the clear.