So, the consultant has a networking guru friend at Sprint who knows the BigIP stuff, and that guy explained that the BigIP software has a bug and doesn't handle the header coming back from Tomcat properly (it handles Apache all right), and so he had to configure it differently for that. This consultant is a db expert, but he knows lots of Linux and took the first two years of Cisco classes (I can just barely handle Tomcat).
Right now, he's waiting for the BigIP folks to call back on opening up for SSH, because apparently there's a bug with that as well. However, they never called back about the Tomcat, so we're thinking they don't know how to fix this stuff and might never call us back. I think we're using old software, because we're probably using an entry F5 model.
This BigIP appliance has been fiasco from the start. We bought it from Dell, so they said we had to talk to Dell to get support, but the Dell support folks couldn't get anyone on the phone who knew anything about it! I guess they cost only a few measley thousand dollars so it's probably not worth it to them, huh?