BIG-IP : redirect loop : debugging techniques

The web-server gateway IP is set to a VIP on the internal engineering network F5. This F5 routes traffic to a pool of DNS that resolve the hostnames to the appropriate server IPs.

Does that mean that the data path is the same for both? In other words, assuming the web server is talking to another web service and database in relation to a client request, does the web server communicate with these services in the same way regardless of how the client connects to the web server?

How would I determine whether the 302 is originating from the web-server or the F5 ? As I demonstrated above, curl from the F5 command-line direct to the web-server IP returns the entire page content as expected.

Completely understand that, and perhaps I'm grasping at straws here, but in the absence of anything else that might make sense, it would be helpful to know definitely which device is actually sending the redirect. So, if you run a tcpdump on the interface between the f5 and the web server and use the -Xs0 option, you'll see the HTTP payload coming from the web server (assuming it's not encrypted).

tcpdump -lnni [internal interface] -Xs0 [and any additional filters]

This will ultimately tells us where to look for the problem.