SSL termination and redirect

Question

We have moved SSL termination to a loadbalancer (F5) from the Sun webservers. The load balancer after terminating SSL goes to the http listener on the webservers. We have some NSAPI code that does a redirect. It used to do the redirect based on the original scheme of the listener (if http then the redirect was http based. If https then redirect https). Of course, now all redirects come back http even though the user may have an https session.
For weblogic we can feed a header from the F5 (WL-PROXY-SSL) and it would recognize that a load balancer was used for SSL termination and perform java redirects using the correct scheme. Is there any header like this I can feed to the Sun Webserver so it recognizes that a loadbalancer has terminated the SSL session and any redirects should be https?

Answer 1

It might be easiest to configure separate HTTP listeners (e.g. separate ports) for SSL and non-SSL requests. You can configure which scheme should be used in self-referencing URLs (such as those used in redirects) per HTTP listener. In Sun Java System Web Server 7.0, you can do that using the admin GUI, CLI, or by editing the server.xml configuration. If you edit server.xml, you need to specify the <server-name> element in the appropriate <http-listener> element.