Frequent logout with F5 load balancer and round robin DNS | Search |
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Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 8401 Registered: 10-2002 |
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Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support Board Administrator Username: Bryce Post Number: 8402 Registered: 10-2002 |
Hi, You raise an interesting point about round robin DNS. I have discussed this with our team, and we will make changes in the next update to allow login sessions to transfer across load balanced hosts. However, I think there is a way that you can solve this problem with configuration settings in your load balancer. I am not familiar with detailed configuration of the F5 load balancer, but I know it has many features to address common load balancing issues. This type of issue is a very common issue for load balancing HTTP-based services. The most common solutions are known as “cookie persistence” (if you are using plain text unencrypted HTTP) or “SSL persistence” (if you are using encrypted HTTPS). For cookie persistence, the load balancer can insert a session cookie into the HTTP headers. When the client sends this cookie in subsequent requests, the load balancer continues to send this client’s requests to the same server. Because it is a session cookie, the web browser will not save it, it will keep the cookie in memory and discard it when the browser is closed. (The load balancer will also likely have a timeout, where after a period of inactivity, it will consider the cookie inactive.) If you are using SSL/TLS connections, the load balancer can use the SSL session ID to continue to direct requests to the same server. If the load balancer is not configured for SSL persistence, the end-user is not aware, but there is more overhead because a full SSL/TLS handshake needs to be performed for each request. I’d recommend that you consult the F5 documentation for more information on cookie persistence and SSL persistence. Regards, Bryce Norwood NowSMS Support |