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adharkrader's avatar
adharkrader
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Feb 03, 2011

Detecting redirect loops with LTM?

Is there a way to detect when a user is caught in an endless redirect loop? It's usually between two virtual servers... A "calls" B with an expectation of returning to A but something goes wrong and they end up cycling endlessly. Single signon seems to be a favorite...

 

 

Anyway, sometimes they are 302 redirects, sometimes meta redirects in code on the landing page. The developers say there's no way for them to detect it (not sure about that) but are hoping the F5 or firewall could catch it...

 

 

Since it's multiple VSes, it would seem like I'd have to do something like a counter in a domain cookie or track redirect by IP address in a global table... all of which sound yucky to me.

 

 

Ideas?

 

 

Thanks - Al

 

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  • hooleylist's avatar
    hooleylist
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Feb 03, 2011
    You could try to track redirect loops, but I think it would add significant load to track every HTTP request. What would you want to do if a client was looping between two different virtual servers? The client will give up anyhow (typically after 30 redirects).

     

     

    Perhaps you could set a session cookie which tracks the redirects. Once that cookie value exceeds a threshold you could send a different HTTP response to break the client out of the loop. You'd probably want to reset the cookie value to 0 when a request is not redirected.

     

     

    Aaron