Installing behind F5 BigIP device

  • We recently put up a number of new WordPress sites, some of which are Internet facing. The original plan was to have WordPress be the DocumentRoot for each site and to enable MultiSite in subdirectory mode. We utilize F5 BigIP devices for load balancing and SSL handling on our Internet and intranet. While things went smoothly when installed directly to the server (the url being something like “https://newserver.example.com”), the setup couldn’t complete when going through the BigIP (“https://topsite.example.com). Installing WordPress to a subdirectory (“https://topsite.example.com/blogs”) got us around this, but there’s now a clamor for making it the DocRoot.

    None of these sites will be load-balanced right now, but we want to keep our options open and so would like to keep them behind the BigIP.

    Our servers are Red Hat Enterprise 5 and we are using the shipping Apache 2.2. They are multi-homed, with separate interfaces for the host itself and target for the BigIP vip.

    I have tried variations on the default Apache config, including separate vhosts for the direct (hostname) and external (BigIP) urls.

    Can someone give me a place to start in debugging this? Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks.

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  • Thread Starter plembo

    (@plembo)

    On a hunch I decided to try installing and configuring another MultiSite instance directly to the server hostname (newserver.example.com) with WP as DocumentRoot, and then reconfiguring it to use the BigIP name (topsite.example.com). The reconfiguration was done by editing wp-config.php and the database to replace the actual hostname with the BigIP name. The latter was accomplished by doing a mydsqldump to a text file, searching and replacing, and then restoring.

    It worked. Apparently whatever was going wrong with the WP install through the BigIP is something specific in the install process (whacky rewrites/redirects?), not the final site configuration.

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