Redirect loop on Websphere Portal for anonymous usres

Question

We have in production an websphere portal 8.0 on was 8.0.0.7 (at http://imm.msinf.ro). All of a sudden (and i really mean) that, when you try to access the home page it goes into an redirect loop, switching again and again between just 2 urls: /wps/redirect and one of those strange looking one (this one never changes). The home page has the right permissions (for both anonymous and authenticated users) and it used to work just until last evening.

If somehow I am logged in with any user (by traversing from admin console or some other way) then it works flawlessly, but as an annonymous user, any request on /wps goes into the redirect loop. No errors or any other message in the SystemOut log. Any ideas at least where to start digging?

Answer 1

Yes, with the help of the IBM support team, we finally managed to nail it. Some "coleague", in his attempts to configure some SSO between the portal and some Sametime / Connections servers, changes a small setting in Websphere AS security, asking for authentication even for pages that are marked "public". So the WAS was trying to access a resources, then redirect to login page, but then again, since the login page itself was now needing authentication, it was redirecting again to the login page, and so on and so forth.
Changed back that setting to the default one, to not ask for authentication on public pages, and now everything works ok.