Middleware Announcements

[Renee Frost <>]

The Internet2 Shibboleth team is pleased to announce the availability of
release 1.0 of its Shibboleth implementation. This new release contains
many improvements and enhancements. A partial list is available by going
to the Shibboleth web site (
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu
) and clicking on "Shibboleth v1.0" in the left hand navigation bar. With this release, we feel that this implementation has reached a level of maturity making it suitable for production deployments.

This release contains more complete support for federations. We've removed all Club and Federation references from the Deploy Guides, and have created a separate federation guide for the new InQueue Federation. This document describes the role of this federation, temporary policy guidelines, and includes instructions on applying for membership in this Federation, and configuring a Shibboleth origin and target for membership in the federation. The InQueue federation is the next phase of the "Shibboleth pilot" activity, and is a step towards establishment of the production InCommon federation later this summer.

We had previously announced that this release would include support for a W2K/apache based Shibboleth target. That work is nearing completion, but is not finished. Rather than delay any longer, we are making the linux/solaris based versions available now; we expect to make the W2K version available shortly.

The Shibboleth target implementation now offers more options for storing session information. Previous releases only supported an in-memory cache; this releases supports the use of a database.. This should offer target sites new options for improved robustness. This implementation uses a plugin architecture. A MySQL plugin will available very very soon, separate from the Shibboleth release.

We attributed our most recent delay to problems with the apache xml signature library; we later discovered that we had misconfigured a file. I'd like to apologize to the author(s) of the apache library for my previous statements.

With this release, there are separate distributions for origin and target components. Deploy documentation can be found, linked from the "Shibboleth v1.0 Available" entry in the Navigation Bar of the Shibboleth Home Page:

http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/

This release has been tested on Red Hat Linux versions 7.2 and 7.3, and on Solaris 2.8. The origin implementation is entirely in java, so there is one package for all platforms. There are separate target packages for RH and Solaris. The distribution packages are available from http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/release/shib-download.html

Shibboleth is an Open Source project, and we don't guarantee support. However, if you encounter problems, join the mace-shib-users list @ Internet2 (http://middleware.internet2.edu/shibboleth/shib-misc.shtml#mailinglist), and post a description of your problem; its very likely someone will answer.

If you discover a bug, please post it to our Bugzilla based repository ( http://bugzilla.internet2.edu/shibboleth/). Bugs can be posted against a 1.0 product version.

For those who are so inclined, the source is available from our cvs repository ( http://middleware.internet2.edu/opensaml/cvs.html ). Tarballs containing snapshots of the 1.0 source are also available from http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/release/shib-download.html . These contain documents describing how to compile the new version.

Lastly, a BIG thank you to the people who helped us test this version, and improve the quality of the overall package, the install process, and the documentation.
 
Steven Carmody
Shibboleth Project Manager




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