An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Ian Young <ian AT iay.org.uk>]

On 5 Dec 2013, at 11:14, Peter Schober <peter.schober AT univie.ac.at> wrote:

> While that's not solving the issue why are those EntityDescriptors of
> your IDP so different? Is that something you could influence/change?

That's an important point. If the problem would go away if every place the 
entity was registered had the same metadata for it, it would be interesting 
to look into why there were differences.

One obvious possibility is that if an entity is registered in a dozen places, 
it can be hard to remember to update them all when a change is made. That 
ought to be fixable (and in the long term reducing the number of 
registrations for each entity will help).

The other possibility I can think of is that one or more of the places the 
entity is registered imposes some sort of constraint such that "their" 
version of the metadata is necessarily different. Things like this can be 
technology-based (e.g., a limitation in a federation's metadata repository) 
or policy-based, but as a first step we should try and identify such 
constraints where they exist. Whether we need to work to remove them depends 
a lot on how quickly we can use eduGAIN to remove the need for multiple 
registration, of course.

        -- Ian

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