Environment
Novell BorderManager 3.8 Support Pack 5
Novell BorderManager 3.9
Situation
www.edv-buchversand.deis a Web Shop. It is fine accessing it but when try to add the choosen products in the shopping basked nothing happen.
The webpage does something but the basket stays empty, no number and no product is listed. Sometimes hitting refresh in the browser, brings the page with the correct numbers of items and the products.
Accessing the site bypassing proxy, works always.
Resolution
This site is using a load balance device in front of the site to
load traffic between 2 ip addresses:
212.227.102.49
87.106.27.219
They do not have any "Sticky" session feature enable so one request can go to one ip, second one to the other ip. When going directly, the persistent connections capabilities of the browser keeps all session to the same ip address, hence working but bm does not have this capabilities so it sends first request to 87.106.27.219 but second one to 212.227.102.49. As this site does not share info between the devices, second one is not aware of the items on the basket, as it did come thru the first request. Very bad implementation
The solution is to add the ip address 87.106.27.219 to your hosts file with the domain name www.edv-buchversand.de. Then wait for few minutes, unload proxy, ping www.edv-buchversand.de and see that ip address is the 87. one then load proxy.nlm -cc.
212.227.102.49
87.106.27.219
They do not have any "Sticky" session feature enable so one request can go to one ip, second one to the other ip. When going directly, the persistent connections capabilities of the browser keeps all session to the same ip address, hence working but bm does not have this capabilities so it sends first request to 87.106.27.219 but second one to 212.227.102.49. As this site does not share info between the devices, second one is not aware of the items on the basket, as it did come thru the first request. Very bad implementation
The solution is to add the ip address 87.106.27.219 to your hosts file with the domain name www.edv-buchversand.de. Then wait for few minutes, unload proxy, ping www.edv-buchversand.de and see that ip address is the 87. one then load proxy.nlm -cc.
Additional Information
This issue can be seen taking a lan trace on the BorderManager
server using PKTSCAN.NLM. Trace shows that the POST request,
the action to add the item to the basket, was sent to ip address
87.106.27.219, but when server comes back with a 302 redirect to
refresh the page, the GET was sent to ip 212.227.102.49 and, as
this host is not aware of the item because it does not share any
info with the other one, the page that sent to browser had no item
on it causing the issue.