[Building Sakai] Windows 8 Compatability & Load Balancing

[Kevin Pittman]

Hi,

At Georgia Tech, we are running Sakai 2.8 behind a BIG-IP load balancer,
and for a number of years we've seen periodic issues with Internet Explorer
and Chrome on Windows computers, which can usually be fixed by reducing
the privacy protection settings in either browser.

With Windows 8, however, there doesn't seem to be any way to get either
browser to work.  Both exhibit symptoms that we've seen before when
cookies are disabled, except that I've verified on both browsers that
cookies are fully enabled.  Those symptoms are that the user tries to 
login (via CAS), but when he returns to the application, he gets directed 
to a different app server, and the login ticket doesn't matched, so he 
gets a logged out screen.  On rare occasion, the user gets sent to the 
same server to retrieve the main page code, but subsequent calls to 
retrieve images or framed content get sent to a different server and 
come back as the entire Sakai main logged-out gateway page.

Is anyone else out there running Sakai behind a BIG-IP load balancer and
seeing similar problems?  If so, have you found any solution that lets
Windows 8 users access Sakai?  At the moment, our advice to users is to
switch to Firefox, and even though I'm a big Firefox fan, I hate to have
to tell users that there's only one browser choice on a particular O/S.

I'm also curious about other load balancers -- if your school / group is
load balancing using something other than BIG-IP, what are you using, and
would you recommend it for enterprise-level purposes (we have loads of
3500 to 4000 sessions at one time on weekdays).

Thank you,
Kevin 
Georgia Tech Sakai Application Administrator

-- 
Kevin Pittman                              kevin.pittman at oit.gatech.edu
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Senior Systems Support Engineer        Office of Information Technology
Academic and Research Technologies      Georgia Institute of Technology