Netscaler Knowledgebase

I had my netscalers setup with Load Balanced Virtual Servers pointing to my IIS web server farm.  It was nice and simple.  After some time I realized that I needed to perform forwarding of http://mydomain.com to http://www.mydomain.com.  My options were:

1. Rewrite - this is a function of NS 7.0 and up.  I couldn't use this as it would mess up my cookies big time.
2. Do the redirection on each IIS server; except that it'd be a nightmare to maintain with the number of sites we have.  Not to mention how many servers I have to do this on.
3. Kill my Load Balance VServer and recreate it as a Content Switched VServer.  I couldn't do this either for the downtime it'd incur.

After tinkering for a little bit, I was able to do it this way.

1. From the GUI, go to Protection Features/Filter then go to the Actions tab
2. Add an action with Qualifier "ErrorCode", Response Codes "200", Response Page as follows:
       <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.mydomain.com/">
3. Give it a meaningful name (I use domainname_redirect) and create it.
4. Go to the Policies tab and Add a policy with Request Action pointing to the action you created, and add the following expression
        REQ.HTTP.HEADER Host == mydomain.com
5. Finally, go to Load Balancing/Virtual Servers, then open the Properties window of the Virtual Server you have and go to the Policies tab.  From there you can activate the newly created policy by putting a check mark in the box next to it.

You're all set!

I wanted to let you know that I tried this method in Safari on Windows - yes it's released now:) - and it failed.