Per-Entity Metadata Working Group

[Nicholas Roy <>]

On 10/13/16 10:47 AM, Cantor, Scott wrote:
> > Ah, so the concern is that a node goes away in the middle of serving
> > a metadata request to the client. And, the client would not recover or
> > retry the request?
> Defining "in the middle" as between the time the client is given a particular address 
> and the request is made or completes, yes. Browsers now fetch all A records and auto-failover to 
> all of them, so if you have aggressive timeouts, you get what appears to be a reliable system 
> when you're serving largely static content. Non-browsers don't, and in some cases probably can't, 
> even if they wanted to. The model just doesn't work for "services" very well.
>
> It may be that REST clients are starting to evolve to compensate for this, 
> but my initial research doesn't suggest to me that either Java nor libcurl 
> are doing this, so that covers Shibboleth.

I had to invent some really disgusting .NET code at one point to do this 
for a client I was developing.  I doubt it would be possible in Java, 
but in .NET there is enough DNS functionality exposed in the base class 
libraries that it was possible.

Nick

> -- Scott