How to configure application links through an F5 load balancer

[Timothy Meiner]

Hi,

I have recently had our F5 team in my enterprise configure a connection with JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Fisheye through the enterprise F5 Load Balancer. Right now the connections work as follows:

192.xxx.xxx.xxx/jira

192.xxx.xxx.xxx/confluence

192.xxx.xxx.xxx/bamboo

192.xxx.xxx.xxx/fisheye

Now I am having trouble creating the application links for the apps. Previously I had this all configured through a Windows Web Proxy using IIS so I'm sort of familiar with configuring the server.xml files within my Atlassian boxes (which are all on Linux). 

Unfortunately I don't control the F5 so I will have to coordinate with that team if any changes need to be made on their end. 

I'm having trouble finding documentation on how to set this up through the googles. Has anyone had success with this? 

[Boris Berenberg - Atlas Authority]

Are you sure you updated the server.xml files correctly? Share the connector bit?

You will also need to ensure that they have set up the rewrite profile correctly on the F5. I would also want to know if you're using an IP instead of a hostname for the system's base urls.

[Timothy Meiner]

Hi Boris,

Thanks for the reply. The following is the connector bit I have set up for my JIRA instance:

protocol="HTTP/1.1"

port="8080"

maxThreads="150"

minSpareThreads="25"

connectionTimeout="20000"

disableUploadTimeout="true"

acceptCount="100"

enableLookups="false"

maxSpareThreads="75"

maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"

useBodyEncodingForURI="true"

URIEncoding="UTF-8"

redirectPort="8443"

debug="0"

proxyName="192.xxx.xxx.xxx"

proxyPort="443"

scheme="https"

secure="true"

I also set the context path to:

Context path="/jira"

Right now I'm trying to connect JIRA to a Fisheye instance also hooked up to the F5, here is how I configured Fisheye's config.xml web-server settings:

<web-server site-url="https://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/fisheye" context="/fisheye">

<http bind=":8060" proxy-port="443" proxy-scheme="https" proxy-host="192.xxx.xxx.xxx"/>

All the 192.xxx.xxx.xxx addresses are the same. I set the base URLs as an IP address

Any suggestions on how I can make sure the F5 team set up their rewrite rules correctly?

Thank again!

Tim

[Boris Berenberg - Atlas Authority]

Unfortunately no. I would need to look at the F5 config personally. I assume all user traffic works fine? If so, it may be that the machines can't route to the IP from themselves.

You may be able to set up a split URL application link where their presentation URL is the 192 IP address, and their actual connection URL bypasses the F5. This tends to be a very brittle configuration.