The mailing list for users of the eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (CAT)

[Tom Ivar Myren <tom.myren AT uninett.no>]

Hi,
Nice to see that our local CAT front-end has sparked off an interesting 
discussion.

Our original idea for the national eduroam page was to simply link users to 
the cat.eduroam.org site. 
Then Jørn suggested using the API to make this look and feel more like the 
rest of our webpages - his testing convinced us that a separate end-user UI 
was cleaner and simpler for most users, and we ended up with the solution you 
are now aware of. 
We still link administrators to cat.eduroam.org, and all profiles are fetched 
from CAT (the code acts as a client). 
Tomasz - looks like you are doing the same (as I read the below), with the 
difference that we at the moment offer all profiles not just one institution.

Our intention was certainly not to offend anyone, CAT developers have done a 
great job!
We see this as utilising the possibilities of the API, and giving our 
national users a UI where it is clear that this is UNINETT supported. (Local 
users are more familiar with UNINETT than Geant). 
Through this discussion we learned that the API actually changed somewhat 
from CAT 1.0 to 1.1, and will adapt. (By using both generateInstaller and 
downloadInstaller)
We did choose to not display all information during download and installation 
as we did not see that it was needed. (This is such as Helpdesk info and 
whatever is added under Installer Fine-Tuning)

In our opinion a model with CAT as the central repository for all profiles is 
best.
The web design and user interaction does not have to be centralised, just 
like every institution has its own helpdesk for eduroam problems. 

We have registered a couple of requests to make our implementation available 
and our intention is a version of our «connect» page which uses CAT as a 
single source of truth. 
First we want to adjust it so that one can limit which institutions are 
shown, NROs and institutions can then host their own, with their own (EV?) 
TLS-certificate and their own design. 
This may improve the current situation in two ways:

- Convince IdPs that do not use CAT today to start using CAT (we have a few 
using locally stored profiles both CAT and others) 
- Users get profiles from a familiar design, familiar hostname and (depending 
on IdP) familiar EV-certificate

All profile downloads will go through CAT, and CAT will collect statistics.


We are happy make such a “connect" code available on request through github, 
provided this is OK with the CAT developers.

Br,
Jørn de Jong and Tom Myren 





-----Original Message-----
From: Tomasz Wolniewicz 
<twoln AT umk.pl>
Date: Friday 6 November 2015 at 10:35
To: Zenon Mousmoulas 
<zmousm AT noc.grnet.gr>
Cc: 
"cat-users AT geant.net"
 
<cat-users AT geant.net>
Subject: Re: [cat-users] CAT website design

>Hi
>
>Tomasz Wolniewicz
>UCI UMK
>
>> On 06 Nov 2015, at 10:07, Zenon Mousmoulas 
>> <zmousm AT noc.grnet.gr>
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> I think it's not unrealistic that an NRO or an institution may want to 
>> use/present CAT data without sending the user to the CAT web site, so this 
>> should be facilitated. On the other hand, considerable effort has gone 
>> into translating the CAT UI in many languages, and that should not go down 
>> the drain.
>This is what we do at my university. We have our own instructions but for 
>downloads we link directly to CAT installers via the API. We also tell the 
>users that the installers are made by GEANT so no surprises about signature. 
>Tomasz
>

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