Per-Entity Metadata Working Group

[Tom Mitchell <>]

I was able to get Apache to respond to what I think are protocol-compliant requests. The magic is the “AllowEncodedSlashes” configuration option. I’m sure there’s more to the picture, but maybe this is a reasonable proof of concept. I’m no Apache expert, but would be happy to discuss further.

Here are some examples URLs that are served (with a fake server name):

http://myserver.org/entities/http%3A%2F%2Fexample.org%2Fidp

http://myserver.org/entities/https%3A%2F%2Ffm.incommon.org%2Fsp

http://myserver.org/entities/urn%3Amace%3Aincommon%3Aosu.edu

Using CentOS 7 I added a file named /etc/httpd/conf.d/mdq.conf with these contents:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mdq

  # Allow %2F in URLs, and pass them through as '%2F'
  AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode

</VirtualHost>

The contents of the /var/www/html/mdq/entities directory are:

$ ls
http:%2F%2Fexample.org%2Fidp
https:%2F%2Ffm.incommon.org%2Fsp
urn:mace:incommon:osu.edu

I’d be happy to share the server name individually with those that want to try the above queries. I don’t want the server name in the mailing list archive.

The first URL is from the spec, and serves up some text. The other two will serve up the real data grabbed from the MDQ beta server. I think they represent the two main kinds of entity IDs in InCommon and eduGAIN. Let me know if I should try others.

Thanks,

Tom