General question about Load Balancing in Windows 2003 server.

[Zick Boy]

Hi all,

I am not a network admin at all and my knowledge on networking is limited pretty much to home networking.

The company where I currently work provides a server for us to host our .Net web applications. Recently I had a problem where my application would not show up, they kept insisting on me to change the name of the webspace because they didn't know why it would not work with the particular name I chose. Eventually, the explanation I got was this:

The sites goes through Alteon Load Balancers. This is to provide 24X7 access to the environment. The environment also hosts secure websites (https://) . In order to make the environment as self-managing as possible we had to set "rules" on the Load Balancers (LB's). The rest set is as follows:

2424ssl
/abc
/xyz
etc...

Any url or combination of the url will automatically be transferred from http to https.... or a secure website.

So, for example if someone creates a website http://server/abc123 it will not work on the standard http url.
This is because the load balancer sees the /abc first and runs its rule first, before it gets to the webserver. The user need to changes his or her url to something other than the above mentioned names.

I thought to myself: "This is the most absurd thing I've ever heard." But then, I don't know much about load balancing a SSL server farm. I just want to know a little bit more about this practice and how common/often is implemented or find out if they're just Bullsh***ng me (it has happened before).

If somebody knows or point me to a URL, I'll appreciate it.

Thanks