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

[Alex Stuart <alex.stuart AT ed.ac.uk>]

Hi Jan,

This is intentional behaviour. The UK federation imports eduGAIN 
entities and re-publishes them into its production metadata aggregate. 
However we operate an opt-in to export metadata to eduGAIN rather than 
export the whole aggregate. This arrangement means the opt-in is a 
straightforward administrative decision rather than one that requires 
reconfiguring the entity.

So, yes, users accessing SPs via the UK federation central discovery 
service, or an unfiltered embedded discovery service, will be allowed to 
choose IdPs that haven't exchanged metadata. That's a side-effect of 
decreased friction for the entity operators, and whether this is a 
bug/feature depends on your point of view.

Like Brook said: if there are UK federation services that your exported 
IdP wishes to access, you can contact them directly to ask that they 
export to eduGAIN. Or you can contact the UK federation service desk 
(service AT ukfederation.org.uk) and we can facilitate.

Regards,
Alex

On 05/02/2014 08:54, Jan Tomášek wrote:
> Hello,
>
> we have discovered that UK federation republishes all entities from 
> eduGAIN into their metadata:
>     http://metadata.ukfederation.org.uk/ukfederation-metadata.xml
> but they are not doing oposite. So entites from UK federation are not 
> being republished into eduGAIN.
>
> I think this could confuse users. By a short experimenting I've found 
> SP https://www.scran.ac.uk/ which offer login by using CESNET, 
> Univerzita Karlova v Praze, ... IdP but those login will always fail 
> because https://www.scran.ac.uk/ is not being exported into eduGAIN, 
> our IdP doesn't know about https://www.scran.ac.uk/ and refuses login. 
> Poor user, poor IdP admin who has to explain to users.
>
> Is this intentional or is this a bug?


--
Alex Stuart
Team Leader - Federated Access Management
EDINA, University of Edinburgh


The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.