Shibboleth Developers

[Ryan Campbell <>]

Hi.

As Steve said, I've been contracted to do a few things with the Windows
ISAPI target.  The main things were:

1.  Add .htaccess style directives to the ISAPI target
2.  Add a GUI integrated with the IIS MMC interface
3.  Update/improve the installer
4.  Make any changes necessary to the target and installer for IIS 6.

I've been lurking and tinkering for a bit now to get comfortable with how
the Shib architecture works.  Thus far I have:

-  Set up a stand-alone linux-apache origin and a Windows target
-  Set up a Windows development environment.
-  Completed a working prototype of directive support using the Windows
   registry as the database store
-  Completed a working prototype of an MMC extension for IIS to manage the
   directives.

I don't yet have CVS access, but if anyone wants to take a look at the
prototypes, I can send a link to binaries and/or source. The GUI interface
dll is fairly small (88KB), stand-alone, and easy to install/uninstall.
The ISAPI target should drop in if you have a target set up using
shibtarget_4.dll and shib_5.dll, but it may prove easier to recompile from
diffs if you're using a much different version of the source tree than I
used.

These are just prototypes, so we should talk about some of the design
assumptions I used.  One of the main open questions is where to store the
directives database.  I initially chose the registry over the IIS metabase
and .htaccess flat files due to the following pros and cons:

Flat files
--------
Pros:
  Easy to maintain without tools
  Cross compatibility with Apache
Cons:
  Speed
  Shared resource management
  More complex to maintain per-file directives
  Much more complex to maintain different directives for virtual
  hosts/directories

Metabase
----------
Pros:
  XML file can be edited/repaired/transferred out of band
  Custom data types
  Easier to script changes (ADSI)
  Automatic inheritance
  Read speed

Cons:
  Metabase schema must be modified
  On IIS 4 and 5 systems: can only modify off-line metabase by hand
  Some history with corruption issues

Registry
--------
Pros:
  Stability

Cons:
  Harder to script changes

----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Gilbert" 
<>
To: 
<>
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 4:31 PM
Subject: RE: added functionality for shib target on W2K..


> The future, however, is more likely to use an ASP.NET support.

Steve and I discussed this as a potential near-future project.


    -Ryan Campbell