Grouper Developers Forum

[Emily Eisbruch <>]

Grouper Call 3-Mar-2010

 *Attending*

Tom Barton, U. Chicago  (Chair)  

Gary Brown, Bristol     

Shilen Patel, Duke    

Chris Hyzer, U. Penn  

Tom Zeller, U. Memphis 

Steve Olshansky, Internet2 

Emily Eisbruch, Internet2 (scribe)  

 

*New Action Items*

For SMM:

Note: these proposed presentations are subject to change.

   [AI] (Shilen and Rob) will present on using the new Grouper priv. mgmt features to manage access in Active Directory. 

   [AI] (Chris) will demo the Grouper Kim workflow.

   [AI] Chris will to do a notification proof of concept demo.

 

   [AI] (Chris) will demo using web services to define permissions.

   [AI] (TomZ) will think about what to say about Ldappc – ng for Grouper 1.6

   [AI] (Shilen) will present on Grouper performance issues

[AI] (TomB) will send Emily an update to the abstract

[AI] (Emily) will list Rob, Shilen, and TomZ as presenters on the agenda.

 *Carry Over Action Items*

[AI] (TomB) will investigate starting work on uPortal / Grouper integration     

 

**Discussion**

*Internet2 Spring Member Meeting* 

The Grouper Working Group will have a 90-minute session at Spring Member Meeting.

http://events.internet2.edu/2010/spring-mm/agenda.cfm?go=session&id=10001170&event=910

Grouper 1.6 will be released right around the SMM.

Suggested presentations (subject to change) for  the Grouper Working Group Session:

  [AI] (Shilen and Rob) will present on using the new Grouper priv. mgmt features to manage access in Active Directory. 

  [AI] (Chris) will demo the Grouper Kim workflow.

  [AI] Chris will to do a notification XMPP proof of concept demo. Note: If  Rob Hebron is going to demonstrate something along these lines, then Chris might not do this.  

 

  [AI] (Chris) will demo using web services to define permissions.

  [AI] (TomZ) will think about what to say about Ldappc – ng for Grouper 1.6. Does it make sense to show the XML integration file?  When U. Memphis puts the new LDAPPC work into production (most likely after SMM), there will be much to report to the community. 

  [AI] (Shilen) will gather performance data to present at SMM 

 Once the presentations are decided,  TomB will send Emily an update to the abstract for the SMM online agenda

[AI] (TomB) will send Emily an update to the abstract

*Coordination for Grouper 1.6 Release* 

Grouper 1.6 target  release date is end of April (around SMM)

 Items being worked on for Grouper 1.6:

- Attribute Framework. Chris will start working on that.

- Web services enhancements (including exposing attributes) – next for Chris after attribute framework. 

(Note: formatting and validation/enumeration, validate based on key will be deferred for Grouper 2.0)

- Ldappc-NG  -- TomZ is writing tests and working through them. 

 

- Flattened memberships table to facilitate notification - Shilen working on this. It will get used by the change log daemon. 

Shilen will run test cases to ensure this performs well in a large database. Chris will help with the change log.

There will also be a flattened permissions table, though perhaps not for Grouper 1.6.

- Performance testing – Shilen will work on it. Shilen had concerns about some queries being slow in the Grouper 1.5 release, especially with MYSQL databases. But so far no one has raised this as an issue.

*Additional Grouper Features/Enhancements*

TomB noted there is an item on the Grouper Roadmap (not assigned to a release) of Federated Grouper Management, and there is some need for it. There can be separate Grouper instances, operating within two different namespaces, that need to share some of their groups. At some point, one Grouper instance will want to notify the other on changes to a group they agree to share between them.  This is not going to be done by database replication. 

Rob Hebron’s work on the ESB connection (and having two independent Groupers connected by an ESB) could be helpful. Technical/ edial difficulty apparently prevented Rob from joining today’s Grouper call. 

 

Q: Are we done working on roles for now?

A: Roles are well implemented in the API. The next step is to make web services handle permissions

Q: What about extending Grouper into the access management space?

A: Hope that in the next few months we can create a concrete context to guide the UI through which capabilities are exposed.

*Caching & Distributed Caching*

Surfnet raised a concern on the users list about Grouper caching:

https://mail.internet2.edu/wws/arc/grouper-users/2010-03/msg00003.html

Currently there are issues with distributed caching and with web services. When there are multiple machines involved in UI or web services, it can be hard to handle caching.  

There are also some issues with generic cache management.  

Grouper uses Ehcache; does not use maps. Often caches don’t get cleared when things get updated.  

Query caching is an issue. Suggestion that queries can only return IDs of objects. Then have something to resolve those IDs.   

Setting up Ehcache correctly will solve some issues. 

Terracotta offers more of a client server approach.

We should tackle the caching issues after Grouper 1.6. For now, organizations can turn off caching if needed.

*Set Function*

Shilen will work on the set function issue. This involves adding progress and batch improvements to group set function

https://bugs.internet2.edu/jira/browse/GRP-387

The plan is to add this change to the Grouper 1.5 branch. The next release will be Grouper 1.5.2.

Next Meeting: Wed., Mar 17, 2010 noon ET

Note that in the USA, daylight savings time takes effect on March 14. This requires a different time adjustment for Europeans taking part in the next Grouper call.

Emily Eisbruch, Technology Transfer Analyst

Internet2

office: +1-734-352-4996 | mobile +1-734-730-5749

Internet2 Spring Member Meeting
April 26-28, 2010 - Arlington, Virginia
http://events.internet2.edu/2010/spring-mm/