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Odd Load Balancer Issue

Our web servers are hosted on a 3rd party network (which our network is directly tied to). Meaning we can get to our servers at the 3rd party like we would servers sitting in our building.

Anyway, we have a load balancer and 2 web servers (let's call then ws1 and ws2).

All of our websites (www.oursite.com), obviously, goes through the LB and directs the traffic to either WS1 or WS2. If we want to bypass the load balancer, we can go to ws1.oursite.com or ws2.oursite.com.

So, here's the problem.

From internally only, if I try to go to www.oursite.com, the sites don't load. They  just spin and spin and spin. We're seeing some of the HTML come back, but it doesn't serve up the whole page.

If I go to ws1.oursite.com or ws2.oursite.com, everything loads as it should. Again, this is only happening internally...external users are not seeing any issues.

I'm not 100% convinced it's the Load Balancer causing the issue, but it sure seems that way since the LB receives the request and then sends the content back to the browser.

We are all really stumped here. Short of rebooting the Load Balancer, does any one have any insights or ideas? Thanks in advance!
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KBB

What kind of load balancing are you doing, DNS round robin or are you looking at web server performance? What kind of load balancer are you using?

What a happens if you stop IIS on one of the webservers? Does all traffic get properly sent to the online webserver or do you get directed to offline webserver?

You stated " from internally" so I assume the issue is only from internal. From an external source its working correctly, is this right?

Is your internal DNS correct?
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ASKER

Kurtis,

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, external sources have no issues at all. Our internal DNS is correct. But, even internally, we're using external DNS to access our sites (we have like 6 or 7 different URLs).

I'd have to confirm with our Network team, but I'm pretty sure the LB is using a round robin method. Barracuda Load Balancer ADC is what we're using.

I'd also point out this just started happening this morning.

I tried your IIS test (and possibly discovered another issue, but that's for a later time) with an external user. They reported they were on W2. I turned off IIS on W2. They refreshed the page and the page didn't load. But if they closed their browser and re-opened it, it loaded on to W1. So, it appears the LB is keeping some sort of session.
Are you doing SSL offload or anything that might no be getting passed correctly through the LB?
KBB,

Some of our sites use SSL, but not all of them. Again, this just started happening this morning. We've had this LB set up for a long time now. No one here has been on the LB to change any kind of settings. The audit logs show no activity.
It's just really odd it's only happening on our internal network.

Again, this may not even be a LB issue, but that's where we're starting.
Do you have multiple internal VLANs? Can you try accessing from a different internal VLAN to see if there is any difference... Did FW rule, ACL get changed?
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Since there have been no further suggestions for a possible cause of this issue, I'm accepting my work-around solution as the answer.