Hi all. I'm trying to configure a proxy_loadbalancer with sticky session. I read around the web and in the source code and discovered that this module expects to handle sticky session by re-using the user's session ID provided by the origin server. This is different to BigIP which injects its own cookie that it keeps track of. Apache also expects the origin server to know it is being load-balanced and to change the session ID it creates to include a "route" that identifies that origin server.
So for example if my origin server is Tomcat then the session cookie would be JSESSIONID=12345... and Tomcat has to be modified to make it JSESSIONID="12345.route1". Apache mod_proxy_loadbalancer sees this and finds the route1 and chooses the right origin server based on that. I
also read that PHP doesn't have the possibility of changing the cookie, but since PHP runs typically on Apache, it is possible to modify the configuration of the origin server to post-process the request to add it.
My problem is that I load balance a custom web server and/or IIS and we have neither of these options available. I need the cookie to go through as originally created and I can't change the way it gets created. So, how to do it?
I have tried to add a cookie at the proxy server, but I can't get this to only happen when the origin server sends through its cookie. In fact if the origin server sends an error code, the environment variable I use with SetEnvIf isn't set correctly. I can't see how to add a cookie in a post-processing filter of some sort either. The only ways I see to add cookies are in mod_rewrite (which seems strange to me) and via mod_headers.
Any
ideas?
Thanks,
Michael
