Load Balancing with BigIP / SSL question

Question

I have an oddball question. We're load balancing ColdFusion
MX7 across 3 servers using a BigIP load balancing server. We
decided to go the hardware approach and it has been great except
for one small configuration issue.
We use a mix of SSL and non SSL pages, prior to the switch
from a single server to a load balanced setup I used to script that
would determine if a page that was supposed to be SSL had the
variable CGI.HTTPS turned on or off. If it was off, the page would
redirect back to itself with the SSL turned on.
The problem we have is that we followed BigIP's instruction
to secure the load balancing hardware instead of the three servers
running behind it. So what happens is that the traffic goes to the
load balancer port 441, but then the calls from the load balancer
to the individual servers is port 80. So even if a page is called
as HTTPS://... the coldfusion server says that CGI.HTTPS is "off"
since the traffic is port 80.
This isn't much of a problem, our SSL pages are linked as
HTTPS:// and the only problem would actually arise if someone was
to type in the URL and call it as HTTP rather than HTTPS.
My questions is this, does anyone know of a way that I can
detect if the page should be HTTPS and is not without changing our
configuration and putting SSL certificates on each individual
server?

Answer 1

Hey,
Well the load balancing with the BigIP device is really very
amazing. I think
what i liked most was swapping out servers when their lease
was up, through the
BigIP manager I just stopped all traffic to a server, shut it
down, plugged in
the new one and turned traffic back on. It was really very
easy.
The SSL stuff still gives me a headache to think about. but
I should mention I
no longer work where I was, plus now I'm all .net C# but
that's a different
story.
I think if I was going to do this all again I would not have
secured the bigIP
unit. It was nice to buy one SSL cert for all the servers I
attached rather
than one per server, but getting the SSL sites to work
properly was a headache.
We also use windows file replication where now I would go
with like a pair of
Dell MD1000's mirrored for storage and just have tons of ram
and cpu on the
front end units. Depends what you want to spend I guess. I
think the bigIP unit
we bought was like 20 grand, i think they are cheaper now
though.
Hope I helped.