Rewriting http headers and url for Oracle Applications

[dhingst]

We are running Oracle financial applications and need to provide access to users on the Internet. We can do that fine except for people behind tightly controlled firewalls that only allow port 80 and 443. Oracle insist it has to run it's apps using SSL on non-standard ports like 8001 and such which means many people can't get to them. So to make sure everyone can get to the apps I need to preset it on port 443. Changing the apps/servers isn't an option for many frustrating reasons so I'm looking for something that can reverse proxy and rewrite headers and url's. The hard part is the headers and all urls in the web pages need to be changed on the fly because Oracle hard codes everything with absolute paths.

Can someone give me some advice on what Cisco product(s) may be able to help?

[dhingst]

After bringing this up with my Cisco rep it was recommended I look at the AVS 3120 box which is supposed to support the header/url rewriting I need. Can anyone with experience with these boxes let me know if I'm being steered in the right direction? The documentation doesn't seem to specifically mention this ability or if it does it's worded in a way that doesn't make it obvious.

[hochsr001]

Yes, the AVS 3120s support URL rewrites. We perform URL rewrites to support several of our web applications. I can say after some initial configuration frustration, it does a decent job at this. But, please be aware that it takes considerable effort to "get it right" before it works the way you want it to work. You are being steered in the correct direction.

[dhingst]

Thanks for the info. Since then we've also learned the CSS 11500 series of load balancers is supposed to do this also and has been tested with our Oracle applications. We will try one of the solutions out here soon.

[veriton]

If you are using CSS11503/6 you might also consider the SSL accelerator module (CSS5-SSL-K9). This would save the encryption processing load on the Oracle web tier which might be more cost effective in terms of hardware/Oracle licences.

Simon