InCommon Technical Discussions

["Basney, Jim" <>]

Hi,

If I understand correctly, metadata published by mdq.incommon.org is updated 
each business day at 5pm ET. If true, I request InCommon to reconsider this 
schedule.

For comparison, I see updates from 
http://md.incommon.org/InCommon/InCommon-metadata.xml each business day 
around 3pm ET, which gives us a few hours left in the workday to identify any 
problems caused by the metadata update and contact  for 
assistance when needed. By contrast, since switching to mdq.incommon.org, 
problems with the metadata appear late in the evening, and we don't hear back 
from  until the next business day.

For example, on Fri Oct 18 around 5pm ET https://idp.fnal.gov/idp/shibboleth 
was removed from InCommon metadata, causing problems for Fermilab users 
trying to log on to CILogon over the weekend. Since  was 
unable to assist until Monday morning, we configured a manual metadata update 
on the CILogon servers to continue providing service over the weekend. On 
Monday morning, InCommon acted quickly to add 
https://idp.fnal.gov/idp/shibboleth back in to 
http://md.incommon.org/InCommon/InCommon-metadata.xml at 9:26 ET, but since 
CILogon now uses mdq.incommon.org, we didn't see the update until 5pm ET on 
Monday. It took me a while on Monday afternoon to figure out why the CILogon 
servers weren't seeing the metadata update after  told us 
the problem was resolved.

My expectation was that the move to MDQ would deliver more up-to-date 
metadata, not less.

Sincerely,
Jim