glauber - 11:20 am on Jun 8, 2001 (gmt 0)

Our site is load-balanced through an Alteon switch. We weren't able to use cookie-based persistence because the Alteon got confused when we went into SSH to process the users's credit card info, so we changed to a form of IP-hashing ("minmiss" or something such). The load balancer applies a hashing algorythm to the client IP address to decide which server processes the request.

This worked great until we started getting a lot of complaints from AOL users. We did some research and it looks like AOL randomizes the originating IP address (each request may be coming from a different IP), completely messing up the IP-based load balancing. So we had to turn off the load balancing until we figure this out. :(

We can't be the first site to be having this kind of problem. Does anybody here has any suggestions?

The load balancer is Alteon Ace Director 3. It seems that this switch needs a piece of helper hardware in order to be able to do cookie-based persistence with SSL, and our ISP (Verio) has no plans to get this hardware.

One think i'm wondering is if it's possible to do the IP-based load balanced for most addresses, but single out the AOL subnets and hardcode them to one of the servers.

Thanks for any ideas and suggestions.

Glauber