Shibboleth Developers

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This may be more appropriate on the user's list, and I'll repost there if necessary.  I have been working on a simple SAML monitoring system for our federation.  Using a IP Address authentication based Shib IDP (that I submitted a IDP bug fix to get working), and a set of curl scripts, I was intending to cycle through all the SPs in our federation and verify SAML SSO occurred and that I could get their landing page (or a status page if they implemented one).  Everything seems to be working from inspecting all the Shibboleth logfiles, but there is something I am missing in terms of the Shibboleth SP Session.  After posting the SAML Assertion to the SP's ACS, I get dropped back to the "homeURL" configured in the shibboleth.xml, and if I try and retrieve a protected page via an additional execution of curl, the SSO profile starts over and the SP redirects me to the IDP again.  I have curl configured to store/reuse cookies between execution, which I thought was sufficient to maintain the SP session, but that does not seem to be working.  Anyone have an idea what could be wrong?  Is there something obvious I am overlooking that would explain why I can't seem to use the SP Session that is created on SSO?