Symptoms

Since the migration of our production environment K2 Blackpearl from 4.6.6 to v4.6.11 our users are no longer able to access the Viewflows from their browser and get a page of error 404 "File or directory not found"

Example of a URL leading to the error:
Http://wfk2.intranet: 81/workspace/Tasklistcontrol/ViewFlowMain.aspx?ProcessID=28042

Description of our environment:
- 2 production servers installed in Windows 2008 server, with IIS 7
- access to the farm via a load balancer F5 using the DNS alias "WFK2.intranet" (which is also the name of the farm K2), load balancing on ports 81, 5252 and 5555
- use the same service account to run the "K2 blackpearl Server" service and the K2 web application pools

Other tests performed to diagnose the problem include:
- server name in the URL (instead of "wfk2.intranet") -> no error encountered
- IP address of the load balancer F5 in the URL (instead of "wfk2.intranet") -> no error encountered
- delete the DNS domain in the URL: http://wfk2:81 ... instead of http://wfk2.intranet:81 -> no error encountered
- on the client computer, add a hypothetical alias (ex: wfk2.test) to the Hosts file in correspondence with the IP address of the loadbalancer -> no error encountered

In other words, only the URL provided by default results in an error.

By trying the same item on our Preproduction environment, it responds correctly in ALL situations:
- Test URL: http://wfk2-prex.intranet:81/workspace/Tasklistcontrol/ViewFlowMain.aspx?ProcessID = 28042
- 2 servers used: installed in Windows 2008 server, with IIS 77
- Address of the farm: "WFK2-prex.intranet"
- load balancer F5 with production-like configurations

Only difference between the two environments: in Production K2 Smartforms is installed on a separate IIS site (port 82), while in Preproduction it is included in the site "K2 Blackpearl" by default.
Nevertheless I say that this was already the case before the migration to 4.6.11.

 

Diagnoses

Issue seems to appears to be link to the F5 configuration or Network issue.

We advise you to set all web.config files (Runtime, Designer, Viewflow, workspace ...) in order to change the addresses of the realms with the physical server by the address with the load balancer's URL.
Example:
Realm = "http://msqspdk201:81/ViewFlow /"
By
Realm = "http://wfk2.intranet:81/ViewFlow /"

And add the addresses with the load balancer (http://wfk2.intranet:81/ViewFlow /) in:
Http://wfk2.intranet/Designer/Runtime/Form/Manage+Site+Realms/

And change the address in
Http://wfk2.intranet/Designer/Runtime/Form/Manage+Issuers/
:Replace the server name with the load balancer.

Can you ask your network team to check the F5 configuration?

 

Resolution

There was a strategy on user workstations that forced the user agent into IE7 for the URL of our production farm ("wfk2.intranet").
After disabling this policy, clients can query via the current version of their browser (IE11).
Note that this policy had been in place for a few years and that the problem only appeared when K2 Blackpearl was updated on our servers (4.6.6 to 4.6.11),
which suggests That the latest version of K2 is more "sensitive" to the browser with which the client presents itself (probably because it requires functionality that does not have IE8 and earlier).