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DevCentral > Weblogs > Jeff Browning - Periodic Musings by F5's Director of Product Management, Integration Tools
  Friday, September 12, 2008 #
  
Load balancing MS-Active Directory and Kerberos
submitted 10 weeks ago

You know what? You never know what you might find in the DevCentral Forums. Some pretty cool stuff happens in the Solutions Forums - a place to focus on doing interesting things with F5 gear from an application perspective (i.e. Microsoft app, Oracle App, etc.).

Here's an interesting one I found recently: load balancing resources protected by MS-AD-Kerberos. Not always two technologies you expect to see together... However, thanks to user "ravi.rajan", there's the solution. The trick is that you don't add the BIG-IP to the AD (you can't). Instead, you create a Microsoft Service Principal Name (SPN) for "the HTTP services mapping to a particular domain user ids." For more, go here.

For details about SPNs if you're not familiar with them, you can learn more from Microsoft TechNet (a team I worked on many, many years ago, BTW) or at MSDN if that's more your speed.

According to "ravi.rajan", it's not just the IIS folks that get to play:

 We have kerberos single sign on working for IIS, weblogic, SAP enterprise portal without any issues.end_quote_rb

After talking about this with Colin, he made a good point: once you have this backend wired (and simply doing LB to distinct virtuals/URLs for the various services for IIS, webogic, etc.), why not bring the forms out to the front end and consolidate the process. Theoretically, you could use LTM's form-based auth on the front end. LTM can serve up a standard form and then pass auth through the various services on the backend. Here's a nice little sample (Client Auth Using HTML Forms) in the CodeShare to get you started.

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