Masquerading requests as HTTPS

[Mark Moseley]

Greetings. I've been scouring the list and the net for a solution for this but my apologies in advance if I didn't get the search terms right and missed a RTFM answer.

I work for a web hosting company and we recently purchased a pair of BigIPs. These have the ability to terminate SSL connections and then send regular HTTP to the backend servers (running Apache 1.3.29/mod_perl 1.29 and making heavy use of transhandlers).

My question for the list is this:
Is there any mod_perl-ish to pretend that a request is coming through SSL? The main issue I'm facing is that I've got a couple hundred thousands users, many using mod_rewrite in .htaccess files (and a potentially very very large number and out of my control so modifying them is not an option). Since the BigIP is retransmitting the request as HTTP, the scheme that the backend server is using is 'http', not 'https'. So if a redirect is generated via mod_rewrite, it's redirecting to http://the/url/etc, not https://the/url/etc. Presumably people doing redirects via PHP would have the same issue. However the URL scheme looks to be somewhat inaccessible from $r and if I parse it with Apache::URI and use the scheme method there, I don't know of a $r method to set the URI to the modified URI object.

I've tried setting $ENV{ HTTPS } to 'on', but that didn't help.

Anybody know of a method I might be missing that would help me out? Basically what I'm trying to accomplish is if I see a request coming in on port 443, I want to set $r->method( "https" ) -- and I know there's no method called this, but for explanation sake ;)

Thanks!