Shibboleth Developers

[We're sorry if you receive duplicates of this  message. We've sent 
it to multiple lists, in order to ensure that the entire Shibboleth 
community receives this announcement.]

The Internet2 Shibboleth team is pleased to announce the availability 
of release 1.2 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 v1.2 
Software Now Available" at the top of the page.

This new version will interoperate with the previous 1.0 and 1.1 
versions. However, the new version does contain a number of important 
bug fixes and performance improvements. We would strongly recommend 
that sites running older versions  upgrade to 1.2 as soon as their 
schedule allows. We have not provided an Upgrade Guide, because v1.2 
made many changes to the  configuration process.  However, we have 
provided cookbooks describing both the minimal  configuration changes 
required for local testing,  and for joining the InQueue Federation.

This new release contains many improvements and enhancements. Origins 
and Targets will have significantly more flexibility in configuring 
themselves to meet the demands of publishing static and dynamic 
content, supporting multiple applications, from multiple vhosts, 
while being a member of multiple federations. Targets will also 
support "lazy" sessions, deferring the creation of a Shibboleth 
session until the application determines it is needed. This will 
allow a single URL to provide access to both open and protected 
content. Origins and Targets support configuring global values for 
many Properties, while overriding some or all of these for specific 
sites. This release includes support for several types of key and 
certificate formats. The Shibboleth target will run with the Apache 
2.0 Web server as well as the previously supported Apache 1.3.x, and 
IIS 5.x and 6. The target will provide improved plugability for many 
aspects of the system, including access control modules. Go to 
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/release/Shib-1.2-features.html to 
view a complete list of the changes.

With this release, there are separate distributions for origin and 
target components. The origin implementation is entirely in java, so 
there is one package for all platforms. The target side 
implementation has been tested on Red Hat Linux versions 9 and ES3.0, 
Debian Linux, on Solaris 2.8, and on Windows 2000 and 2003. With this 
release, we have discontinued out previous practice of providing 
target-side binaries. With a growing number of target platforms, this 
became impractical. In addition, as more and more sites move 
Shibboleth into production, we see that they're building from source 
before they deploy (rather than using  binaries). Lastly, the build 
process has gotten much easier... since current operating system 
releases already contain many of the library versions we are 
dependent on. Tarballs containing the final version of the source can 
be downloaded via the Shib v1.2 announce page.

Shibboleth is an Open Source project, and we don't guarantee support. 
However, if you encounter problems, join the mace-shib-users list AT 
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 1.2 product 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.