Stopping Drupal from Logging IP Addresses

No, there's no current way to do this. Doing so is merely obscurity anyways - the IPs will still be logged in the webserver's log files. Could I ask why you'd like this?

http://disobey.com/
http://gamegrene.com/

Drupal logs IP addresses in several places. It's important to disable them all if you wish to preserve the anonymity of your users.

A good way to start the search for possible "IP Address Leaks" is by using Unix `grep` to find every place Drupal references the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable.

$ cd /var/www/drupalsite
$ grep -r REMOTE_ADDR . 

On our installation, REMOTE_ADDR is used in:

includes/bootstrap.inc
includes/session.inc
includes/common.inc
modules/poll.module
modules/statistics.module
modules/comment.module

In each of these files, the client's REMOTE_ADDR is inserted into the database. The same process can be used to "scrub" all of these files... for example, session.inc's sess_read() function can be edited as such:

function sess_read($key) {
  global $user;

  $result = db_query_range("SELECT u.*, s.* FROM {users} u INNER JOIN {sessions} s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.sid = '%s' AND u.status < 3", $key, 0, 1);

  if (!db_num_rows($result)) {
    # uncomment this line to enable IP logging
    #db_query("INSERT INTO {sessions} (sid, uid, hostname, timestamp) VALUES ('%s', 0, '%s', %d)", $key, $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"], time());

    # comment this line to enable IP logging
    db_query("INSERT INTO {sessions} (sid, uid, hostname, timestamp) VALUES ('%s', 0, '%s', %d)", $key, '0.3.2.1', time());
    $result = db_query("SELECT u.* FROM {users} u WHERE u.uid = 0");
  }

Note that some functionality may be compromised by this process; from Drupal's perspective, every user shares the same IP address. In particular, the contact module implements a flood control mechanism which uses User/IP combination to key activities to individual users.

For Indymedia and other public-participation sites that want to have no chance of abetting the prosecution or arrest of a user for speech, I think this option is very worth getting in core.

The alternative is to make a custom module that wipes these clean but given all the places IPs seem to be being logged, at minimum we need an awareness of this issue among core and contrib developers to help track them down. Better would be to build in the no-IP-logging option.

Thoughts for next steps?

~ben

Agaric Design Collective :: http://AgaricDesign.com/ :: Open Source Web Development

hi ,

For apache 2 there is a module for apache If i remember good it's called mod_remove-ip ; then IPs can't be logged anymore by drupal ;) more information can be found : http://dev.riseup.net/privacy/apache/ , & here http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/ApacheLogsWithoutIPs ,

If you want to just annonymize drupal then you can find some solutions here http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/AnonymizingDrupal however I found the suggestment given by imc (to replace ip addresses by time more useful as spam filters can work without blocking all the users ;) ) ...