What the internet sees when you connect.
Every server you connect to learns more than the page you asked for. Below is what this server recorded about your connection — shown twice where it matters: the raw bytes as they arrived, and the Rails framework's tidied-up interpretation.
Behind a proxy or CDN these disagree, and only one is verifiable.
raw Socket peer REMOTE_ADDR |
127.0.0.1 |
|---|---|
raw X-Forwarded-For chain |
216.73.217.13 |
Rails request.remote_ip |
216.73.217.13 |
REMOTE_ADDR is the only address the server truly observed — the machine
that actually opened the TCP connection (often a proxy, not you).
X-Forwarded-For is a header any intermediary can set or forge.
request.remote_ip is Rails walking that chain, skipping proxies it's
told to trust, to guess the real client.
And a server can only ever see the machine that connected to it. If you arrived
through a VPN, a corporate proxy or a CDN, the address above is that intermediary —
accurate, unforgeable, and still not you. Identifying a visitor by IP is an
inference, never a fact.
| Method | GET |
|---|---|
| Path | / |
| Query string | — |
| Protocol | HTTP/1.1 |
| Scheme | https |
| Captured at (server) | 2026-08-13T15:22:29.053Z |
Reconstructed from the Rack env, in the order they appear there.
| Host | littleuniverse.fyi |
|---|---|
| X-Real-Ip | 216.73.217.13 |
| X-Forwarded-For | 216.73.217.13 |
| X-Forwarded-Proto | https |
| X-Forwarded-Host | littleuniverse.fyi |
| X-Forwarded-Port | 443 |
| Connection | close |
| Accept | */* |
| User-Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com) |
| Accept-Encoding | gzip, br, zstd, deflate |
These names are best-effort reconstructions. By the time a Rack app
sees a request, the web server has already upcased header names, turned -
into _, and dropped the original on-the-wire casing and ordering. Recovering
the verbatim bytes would require reading below Rack, in the server's parser — a
deliberate future extension, not part of this view.
| raw header | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com) |
|---|---|
Rails request.user_agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com) |
Geolocation isn't wired up yet — the seam is in place for a local MaxMind lookup.
A curated slice of the Rack env hash the server built for this request.
| GATEWAY_INTERFACE | CGI/1.2 |
|---|---|
| ORIGINAL_FULLPATH | / |
| PATH_INFO | / |
| QUERY_STRING | — |
| REMOTE_ADDR | 127.0.0.1 |
| REQUEST_METHOD | GET |
| REQUEST_PATH | / |
| SERVER_NAME | littleuniverse.fyi |
| SERVER_PORT | 443 |
| SERVER_PROTOCOL | HTTP/1.1 |
| rack.url_scheme | https |
| X-Forwarded-Port | 443 |
|---|---|
| X-Forwarded-Proto | https |