redirect rewirte option in http profile causing looping

I have to believe that what you're experiencing is an application specific behavior. The Redirect Rewrite option will catch a redirect from the server and rewrite http:// to https:// in the Location header. But if what you're sending back to the server from the redirect is still not what the application is requiring, then it may attempt to redirect you again, and again, and again... It's difficult to say what that may be though. I've seen applications like SharePoint that only care about the Host header, and apps like Webmin that apparently care about the Host and Referer headers. I would start by examining what the application does in the absence of the proxy layer, and then try to emulate that on the server side of the connection.

I ran into this on a project:

• http and https Virtual Servers
• http to https redirect irule
• https offload to http pool
• http profile with Redirect Rewrite: All

• Page would not load correctly (html would load but no CSS or images)
• Fiddler revealed that the application servers were redirecting all content requests to the base uri with a single-sign-on logoff parameter appended...and then redirecting the redirect with a duplicate parameter appended...and then again...
• It looped like this until the redirect had 10+ duplicate parameters and it finally gave up, but never returned the real content.

• Finally determined that Redirect Rewrite was rewriting the Referer header to "https://sub.domain.com/path/", which the application (on http) was rejecting/redirecting.
• Used this iRule to rewrite incoming Referer header to "http://sub.domain.com/path/"

    when HTTP_REQUEST {
    set referer [HTTP::header "Referer"]
    if { $referer starts_with "https://" } {
        set httpReferer "http://[string range $referer 8 end]"
        HTTP::header replace "Referer" $httpReferer
    }
}