Forcing Web Front Ends (WFEs) to load content locally with SSL Offloading in place

Question

I have come across an unusual issue. We have SSL Offloading and Load Balancing using F5. This all works fine for both external and internal client requests, but now I find I wish to have the WFE's reference themselves (127.0.0.1) when loading pages while on the specific WFE.

Right away, I looked at the Alternate Access Mappings (AAMs) for our SharePoint 2010 farm. It was set for all requests to point to the default, SSL-secured version:

Internal URL: https://site.mydomain.com<br>
Zone: Default<br>
Public URL for Zone: https://site.mydomain.com<br>

Internal URL: http://site.mydomain.com<br>
Zone: Default<br>
Public URL for Zone: https://site.mydomain.com

Now, obviously my first thought was to change the Public URL for the http:// entry to point to HTTP: directly:

Internal URL: http://site.mydomain.com<br>
Zone: Default<br>
Public URL for Zone: http://site.mydomain.com

This seems to have broken the ability for document libraries to expand/collapse groups for some reason. I reverted it back for now.

I still need to find a way to have local WFE's point to themselves when attempting to load pages though. Does anyone know what method I can use to allow for this? I have disabled loopbacks on both WFE's already using the following blog entry for guidance: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sharepoint_foxhole/archive/2010/06/21/disableloopbackcheck-lets-do-it-the-right-way.aspx

Answer 1

Add an additional zone to the web app and configure the AAM for the new zone. You can specify different bindings to allow access via http.