Disable "Connection: close" effect in server response

Hello,

I have a faulty application that mistakenly sending "Connection: close" on specific HTTP 1.1 requests.

LTM, upon receiving the "Connection: close" response from the server tears down the server side TCP session (sends FIN packet, etc)

In order to disable this behaviour, I came up with this iRule that removes the Connection header for identified requests :

when HTTP_REQUEST {
  # any condition to identify the request. HEAD here is for testing
  if { [HTTP::method] eq "HEAD" } {
    set hack_response_headers 1
  } else {
    set hack_response_headers 0
  }
}

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
    if { $hack_response_headers == 1 }{
        HTTP::header remove "Connection"
    } 
}

This iRule does what's intended and the client does no more receives the "Connection: close". Nevertheless, LTM still tears down the server side TCP session anyway, as if LTM handles the "Connection: close" before any iRule processing.

In there any way to completely disable the "Connection: close" effect on LTM when received on server side response ?

Youssef