How to configure HAProxy so that requests with a different destination IP address is handled by HAProxy?

I have 2 EC2 instances.

  1. HAProxy server listening on port 80 x.x.0.79
  2. Client - meant to just send curl commands and test. x.x.0.12

I am using AWS Route Tables to redirect any requests in my VPC with a destination of x.x.0.35 to be routed to the HAProxy box x.x.0.79.

I am sending curl commands to curl x.x.0.35 from the 2nd EC2 box x.x.0.12

When I curl x.x.0.35, I can see traffic hitting the HAProxy box x.x.0.79 by monitoring tcpdump -qn -s 0 -A port 80.

However, the HAProxy server is not receiving those requests. The requests are just timing out. They are not even hitting the default backend.

This is my haproxy.cfg.

defaults
  mode http
  timeout client 10s
  timeout connect 5s
  timeout server 10s
  timeout http-request 10s

frontend myfrontend
  bind :80

  acl source_ip_a src x.x.x.121
  acl source_ip_b src x.x.0.235

  acl destination1 dst x.x.0.35

  use_backend backend_a if source_ip_a
  use_backend backend_b if source_ip_b

  use_backend backend_a if destination1

  default_backend temp

backend backend_a
    server destination_a x.x.0.57:8000

backend backend_b
    server destination_b x.x.0.178:8000

backend temp
    server destination_c 127.0.0.1:8000

Any advice or guidance would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Does AWS Route Tables change the destination IP of the requests?

i.e. does it arrive with a destination IP of .35 or .79?

Can you demonstrate with a capture?

This smells like normal behaviour of a server receiving traffic that doesn’t match an IP on its interfaces.