IAMUCLAThisMonth2010601

IAMUCLA This Month: June 2010

Happenings

Project Updates

This month, we would like to give you an update on 2 projects we are working on to improve the university's information infrastructure. Below, you will find brief project descriptions and how they may benefit users:

Shibboleth Identity Provider Upgrade:

Internet2 has announced the EOL (end of life) for Identity Provider version 1.3 in June 2010. We are currently running Identity Provider version 1.3 and will upgrade the Identity Provider to version 2.x with a target date of July 2010.

The impact on applications/Service Providers should be minimal. The Identity Provider Upgrade should be transparent, although we would like Service Providers to test their applications in QA/test region. Identity Provider version 2.x is backward compatible with Service Provider version 1.3. however if you are running Service Provider version 1.3 we urge you to upgrade to Service Provider version 2.2 (or the latest) since Service Provider version 1.3 is also going out of support in June 2010. The IAMUCLA Team is here to help you upgrade your Service Provider to version 2.x. Feel free to contact us or for documentation about how to perform the upgrade, please click here. We will send out more detailed documentation in the coming weeks.

How this may benefit you:

The Identity Provider 2.x uses SAML2 as well as SAML1. For consumers, this allows for faster attributes queries if the Service Provider switches to SAML2. For further information about the improvements included with SAML2, please click here

Shibboleth Disaster Recovery:

On Sunday, June 6, 2010, AIS will be conducting an important disaster recovery test of our Shibboleth Single Sign-On System. The test will occur between 9 to 9:30 AM.

As a part of AIS's overall disaster recovery implementation plan, AIS is creating an off-site, hot standby Shibboleth environment. This test marks the final validation of Shibboleth's disaster recovery environment at UC Berkeley. Once in operation, Shibboleth will fail over to our Berkeley Disaster Recovery site should the AIS data center become unavailable.

This test will trigger 2 brief outages. We will be doing an actual fail over to Berkeley's instance and back. Depending on the DNS propagation delays The user may experience different lengths of outage. However, each event should last no more than 5 minutes.

If you are interested in helping us test, please contact Datta Mahabalagiri at datta@ais.ucla.edu. We are looking for people to test from different network locations so that we can track the relative DNS propagation delays.

How this may benefit you:

In the event that the AIS data center is down, we will still be able to offer our single sign-on service for your application.

System Announcements

Reiterating the disaster recovery test noted above, services may be intermittent between 9 and 9:30 AM on Sunday, June 6, 2010.

IAMUCLA Technical Support Hours

For the week of June 1, 2010:

Future weekly support schedule updates can be found here.

Contacting IAMUCLA

Web Site: https://spaces.ais.ucla.edu/iamucla
Email: iamucla at ucla.edu
Discussion List: iamucla-user at lists.ucla.edu (subscription info)
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/iamuclanews
Coordinator: Lawrence Lu