32 bitness in the Windows SP

[Cantor, Scott]

On 9/13/17, 9:56 AM, "dev on behalf of Rod Widdowson" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of rdw at steadingsoftware.com> wrote:

> Empirically and anecdotally the 64 bit shibd works with a 32 bit webserver plugin.

Actually, my recollection was that the reason this was a challenge was the path problem. Or did you rename the libraries all over? Which I can't exactly argue would be a bad idea, but I hadn't done it to this point.

> I'd like to push the edge of this envelope slightly in V3 by only every installing the 64 bit service.  We can ship the 32 bit
> shibd.exe but leave it as an exercise to the user to swap it in if they want. This cleans up the installer a fair bit and I think it
> might clean up the documentation too.

IIRC, my concern over the data protocol was to do with numeric sizes. I haven't really ever checked into that deeply. For timestamps, I believe I serialize to strings, in part because I knew the time_t type was a problem.

Obviously this is solveable, RPC does it with explicit int types and since we're Windows only on this issue, it's probably possible to leverage C++11 for that.

> This appears to leave us with two options for support

I don't think leaving it unsupported is really an option. There's no apparent sign IIS app pools are going to stop being 32-bit that I've seen.

If we can formally support mixing them, that's better, but I think the real work on that is the library names. Or does that actually "just work"? I didn't think it tried multiple libraries and magically found the right architecture.

-- Scott