It boots on that node, so logs indicating that it boots on that node is appropriate. When you hit the apache process on head.rs.gsu.edu it essentially redirecs to node1.rs.gsu.edu. All of that is well and good, because it doesn’t know about the redirection.
It works when you do nc -w 2 node1.rs.gsu.edu 31263 or when you try with localhost? If it works with localhost you can modify this line of your after.sh to use "localhost" instead of "${host}".
OR if you want to use lsof instead,
Where you want to add the override is in your before.sh.erb about in the same place as I’ve marked. No need to modify the ood_core library (the safer way would be to add an initializer in the dashboard in /etc/ood/config/apps/dashboard/initializers/template_override.rb and override it there).