InCommon metadata support

[Tom Scavo <>]

Hi Brent,

On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Brent Wygant
<>
 wrote:
>
> We are running Shibboleth SP version 2.4.3. The application is configured 
> to download (cURL) the IdP metadata file from the URL 
> http://md.incommon.org/InCommon/InCommon-metadata.xml. This is where the 
> problem comes in. Once or twice per day, we see the following error in the 
> logs that indicate a problem with connecting a socket...

As Scott already concluded, that's a network issue. Let me ask,
though: Is there a temporal pattern to the failures, that is, does it
fail the same time or different times each day or days of the week?
The reason I ask is: The file changes at roughly the same time every
business day, so if you're seeing systematic failures at a fixed time
each day, that might be something for me to look at more closely.
(It's not likely the problem is on my end but I can't rule it out.)

There's not much to do except to configure your SP to automatically
retry after failure (as Alex mentioned). FWIW, here's a link to our
Shib config page: https://spaces.internet2.edu/x/XAQjAQ

If you find some other configuration that works better, I'd love to
hear about it.

Now here's the bad news. On Feb 15, the size of the aggregate will
grow from ~17MB to ~32MB, so if you're having intermittent failures
now, it's only gonna get worse. All I can say is: configure your SP
properly and keep on eye on it. If you observe a pattern, let us know.

Hope this helps,

Tom