Shibboleth Developers

this week, we've seen a *lot* of questions representing a broad range 
of issues and problems that a site might encounter when installing 
the shib software.... its been like a trip down memory lane, visiting 
all these old problems, issues, and friends...  (-:

I started wondering this morning, tho (I'm snowed in... and have time 
to wonder...) what role the Chas' middleware diagnostics effort might 
play in helping (some entity) to understand and diagnose these 
problems....

until now, I'd thought of MD as being primarily relevant to 
monitoring ongoing operations and diagnosing the myriad of weird 
problems that might crop up when is in production use.....  and that 
MD was not that relevant to diagnosing initial installs......

but, I'm concerned about whether we might see more and more campuses 
bringing this level of skill and experience to a shib install, and 
repeating the experience we've seen this week, and wondering how to 
simplify this process......

might MD include functionality that would help with this process?

should we build some sort of specialized "inspector tool" into shib, 
that we could connect to remotely? to validate the basic steps in an 
install?

some other approach?

or is this week just an anomaly?