Enabling and Disabling SSL Redirection in IBM WebSphere Portal

This is something that came up in a recent project, where we noticed that we were unable to access our WebSphere Portal environment whilst the front-end IBM HTTP Server (IHS) servers were down.

This is a bit of a PITA as we wanted to access the Portal instance directly on, say, TCP port 10039/10040 whilst IHS was down(ish), allowing us to do systems maintenance whilst the end-users get a nice friendly "Closed for maintenance" page.

When I dug into the configuration with the SME who built Portal for us, it turned out he'd kindly hardened Portal for us, using the redirect.login.ssl and host.port.https Custom Properties for the WP ConfigService Resource Environment Provider.

This Wiki post says it far more elegantly than can I.

Enjoy