cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
840
Views
0
Helpful
6
Replies

ACE "Secondary" Sticky Method

lou_young
Level 1
Level 1

We're currently switching to ACE to serve our loadbalance needs and are trying to replicate the same set up we had on our old load balancers from another vendor.

I currently have set up stickiness for our web servers using a COOKIE INSERT type sticky method and it appears to be working.

However, if a user comes to our site and has cookies turned off, I presume the stickiness will fail. I'd like to set up a secondary sticky method to use HTTP Headers.

If it works like we want, a user will be stickied to a server based on the cookie insert but if he has his cookies turned off, the ACE would revert to the sticky by HTTP Header method.

Is this possible? If not, does anyone have any other ideas on how to fill this requirement?

Thanks!

6 Replies 6

Gilles Dufour
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

you'll have to define what you mean by sticky on http header.

The cookie is inside the http header.

What else in the header would you want to use for stickyness ??

The alternative is to usually put the cookie in the url.

However, only the server can do this. Not the loadbalancer.

Gilles.

Gilles,

Thank you for your reply.

We use a third party content proxy vendor to distribute our website through-out the world. So it appears to our website that all (most) of our traffic is coming from this vendor. For this reason (and others, such as AOL changing source addresses at will), our primary wish is to use cookies to maintain stickiness. Our developers don't want to add the cookie to the application, nor do they want to maintain a session ID in the URL. So they would like the loadbalancer to insert the cookie. This I already have configured.

Now, on the chance that the client has cookies disabled in his browser, we would like to have a backup sticky method. Our contect proxy vendor inserts an HTTP HEADER called "True-Client-IP" that lists the client's true source IP. As a backup to the cookie disable problem, we would like to revert to using this HTTP HEADER to maintain stickiness.

When using the COOKIE INSERT method, what do most users do to combat the cookie disable problem?

Thanks in advance for your help!

No more opinions on this one?

there is no solution except the cookie in the url.

There is also usually no concept of secondary sticky method.

You can use a secondary cookie, but not a different sticky method if no cookie is found.

So, you should maybe create a webpage informing the users to enable cookies when accessing your application.

Gilles.

Gilles,

I'm out of town right now and won't be able to try anything on the ACE for a week or so, but wanted to thank you for your response.

I'll give it a shot when I get back into the office.

Okay.

I think I have stickiness working even when the client switches from port 80 to 443. This is good. I am currently using the COOKIE INSERT method for stickiness, but I want to use the secondary method in case the client has cookies disbled.

Will the following code for secondary sticky provide the desired result when the URL looks like this:

https://stest.test.com/ires/en-US/html/ProfileSetup?sid=$OE5M.Uvcrdg8.1

sticky http-cookie ateststicky Test_COOKIE_INSERT

cookie insert browser-expire

cookie secondary sid

timeout 720

replicate sticky

serverfarm Test_Farm

Thanks again for all your help!

Getting Started

Find answers to your questions by entering keywords or phrases in the Search bar above. New here? Use these resources to familiarize yourself with the community: