Nginx load balancing to keep sessions between IIS servers

[Francis Daly]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 06:01:35PM -0400, robe007 wrote:

Hi there,

> I have set up a load balancer with NGINX for two IIS web servers that works
> with sessions.

What is "a session"?

The answer to that may make it clear how to achieve what you want.

> upstream mybalancer {
>     ip_hash;
>     server server1.com:80;
>     server server2.com:80;
> }
> 
> #Server
> server {
>     server_name server3.com;
>     location / { 
>     proxy_pass http://mybalancer; 
>     }   
> }
> 
> When I make a request to server3.com it gets redirected -for example- to
> server1.com. Next I make the login, go to a specific page, let's say:
> server1.com/welcome/maps. Everything is ok.

That... probably should not happen.

In a reverse proxy situation, your client should not know (or care)
whether it is talking to server1 or to server2 -- it only interacts
with server3.

(It is possible that I am just misunderstanding the terminology here.)

> Now I turn off server1.com, and NGINX redirects me to server2.com, but
> prompts me to the login page.

I think "no".

server2 asks you to login; nginx does not. And that difference matters
here.

> It's possible to configure NGINX to keep the same sessions when one server
> goes down? This means that -in my example- NGINX could redirect me to
> server2.com/welcome/maps with the same session.

Back to the first question -- what is a session?

I suspect that in your system it is "state stored on the back-end server1
or server2"; and it is not anything that the browser knows about and
not anything that nginx knows about. The browser might have a "key"
to the session in a cookie.

If that is the case, then the fix would be for you to make sure that
server1 and server2 both have the same shared idea of a session, so that
the same cookie sent to either server will end up with the same response.

And there is nothing the nginx can do about arranging that.

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org