Stuck trying to get Authcache 2 recipe: Upgrade to Varnish and ESI working

Thank you for the reply

Have been playing with this further and performed the recommendations you suggested.

I disabled all modules that might have been setting session cookies so now when i check the headers the only cookie being passed is the has_js cookie.

i then made sure the following line is in my vcl_recv

set req.http.Cookie = regsuball(req.http.Cookie, "(^|;\s*)(__[a-z]+|has_js)=[^;]*", "");

But still no joy

this is the headers i receive now

Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Cache-Control:max-age=0
Connection:keep-alive
Cookie:has_js=1
Host:pcmarket.net.au
If-Modified-Since:Tue, 07 Oct 2014 05:58:09 GMT
If-None-Match:"1412661489"
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.124 Safari/537.36
Response Headersview source
Accept-Ranges:bytes
Age:0
cache-control:public, Max-age=86400
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Encoding:gzip
Content-Language:en
Content-Length:11439
Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8
Date:Tue, 07 Oct 2014 05:59:02 GMT
ETag:"1412661541"
Expires:Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified:Tue, 07 Oct 2014 05:59:01 GMT
Link:<http://pcmarket.net.au/content/what-we-do>; rel="canonical",<http://pcmarket.net.au/node/17>; rel="shortlink"
Server:Apache/2.2.29 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.29 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_bwlimited/1.4
Vary:Cookie, Accept-Encoding
Via:1.1 varnish
X-Generator:Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.4.33
X-Varnish:301025354
X-Varnish-Cache:V MISS

I've compared my headers with another site i know know where varnish is working and everything checks out other than the 2 numbers showing for X-Varnish

Not sure on answer for point 1. this was form Chrome in incognito mode, maybe that makes a difference?

As for point 2. as per the bottom of https://www.drupal.org/node/2162047
I have a custom module where i try to manipulate the headers.
when i disable this module this is the headers i get (drupal core cache is disabled)

Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0

ok i guess, i should disable that custom module then?

and yes i have enabled Authcache Varnish Storage Backend and disabled Authcache Builtin Storage Backend.

so this is what authcache debug now reports to me, I'm pretty sure i have my settings.php etc configured correctly...

Cache Status: "Page EXCLUDED"
Message 1: "Excluded: No active cache backend."
Message 2: "P13n: None of the enabled client modules is active on this request, markup substitution will not work."
Message 3: "Varnish: Request did not came in via a configured reverse proxy server. Authcache-Key not added to response."
Page Render Time: "916.3 ms"
Page Age: "5 seconds"
Settings
Debug Users: ["XXX"]
Cache User: 0
Cache Backends: "authcache_varnish"
Active Backend: null
Authcache Key: "http://pcmarket.net.au"
P13n Clients: "Ajax, ESI"
Active P13n Clients: "No active client module"
Cache-Control: "no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0"
Via reverse proxy: "No"
HTML/JavaScript time: 27 ms

i'm seeing a lot of access denied errors in the log now for authcache-varnish-get-key.

The location line seems a bit weird.

TYPE access denied
DATE Tuesday, October 7, 2014 - 23:17
USER Guest (not verified)
LOCATION http://27.50.68.37/authcache-varnish-get-key
REFERRER
MESSAGE authcache-varnish-get-key
SEVERITY warning
HOSTNAME 27.50.68.37
OPERATIONS

This is what authcache debug reports when i am logged in

StatusCache Status: "MISS"
Page Render Time: "533.78 ms"
Page Age: "98 seconds"
SettingsDebug Users: ["Billy"]
Cache User: "208"
Cache Backends: "authcache_varnish"
Active Backend: "authcache_varnish"
Authcache Key: "aef10fa"
Key props: {"base_root":"http://www.pcmarket.net.au","roles":[6],"ajax":false,"esi":true}
P13n Clients: "Ajax, ESI"
Active P13n Clients: "ESI"
Cache-Control: "public, max-age=21600"
Via reverse proxy: "Yes"
HTML/JavaScript time: 194 ms

Yes i run a dedicated server running centos with WHM and cpanel virtual hosts.

in my settings.php i have

$conf['reverse_proxy_addresses'] = array('127.0.0.1');

in my default.vcl i have

backend default {
    .host = "27.50.68.37";
    .port = "8080";
}

in /etc/sysconfig/varnish i have

VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT=80
VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1
VARNISH_ADMIN_LISTEN_PORT=6082

I finally got this working for both anonymous and authenticated users thanks to your hint.

To work with Cpanel i had to use the sites external IP in my settings.php

$conf['reverse_proxy_addresses'] = array('27.50.68.37');

and then in the VCL

backend default {
.host = "27.50.68.37";
.port = "8080";
}

hooray!

Thanks znerol for the support and the module!