"Change detected, signaling reload thread" question

[Anna Maurer]

Hello,

 

My name is Anna and I work at UC Berkeley. I have a question on the above.
I've been unable to find the answer via googling, or via the
wiki.shibboleth.net site. 

 

Brief intro: My main project involves an application hosted at UC Berkeley,
but used by two additional UCs. One of those UCs has launched Shibboleth as
their authentication system, and I was given the task of building the SP to
connect to the other school's IdP. I am not an experience Shibboleth coder,
but I build the database and could spell "Shibboleth" and attended a
workshop on building an SP. We have a three system environment - Dev, Qa,
Prod. Windows based, running IIS 6, virtual machines. So far, I've been
working and learning in Dev.  I have full access to the various XML files,
and the ability to restart the Shib service, but do not have access to the
IIS manager or OS. 

 

Issue: A few weeks ago, I had the department that manages our servers
upgrade to 2.4.3 on Dev, and install the software for the first time on QA.
While configuring the QA shibboleth2.xml file yesterday - and staying well
away from the "restart shib service" routine -  the websites on QA started
going down.  I quickly replaced the copy I was working on with the default
shibboleth2.xml file, and was able to get the sites back up.  

 

I've been working/learning in dev for a few months now, and the only time I
took down the server like this was after I had restarted the shibd service
with a bad shib2.xml file. This time, the service seemed to restart on its
own. The shibd.log had nothing since the initial install on 8/9, but
native.log had these lines at the time of the problem:

 

INFO Shibboleth.Config [6708] isapi_shib: change detected, signaling reload
thread...

INFO Shibboleth.Config : reloading local resource...

ERROR Shibboleth.Config : error while loading resource
(E:/opt/shibboleth-sp/etc/shibboleth/shibboleth2.xml): XML error(s) during
parsing, check log for specifics

CRIT Shibboleth.Config : maintaining existing configuration, error reloading
resource (E:/opt/shibboleth-sp/etc/shibboleth/shibboleth2.xml): XML error(s)
during parsing, check log for specifics

 

The ERROR and the CRIT are understandable - I was still working on
shibboleth2.xml, and wasn't anywhere near ready to restart the service and
reload the file for testing. But it looks like it reloaded on its own when I
saved the file. I checked my logs from my earlier dev work - I couldn't find
the same lines, and I was configuring and saving shibboleth2.xml constantly.
It looks like we were originally on 2.2.1 before the upgrade, but I can't
find any release notes that indicates "auto restart of shib service on
shibboleth2.xml file change."  

 

I've checked everywhere I can think of and can't find details on why this is
happening. I've confirmed it on Dev - any time shibboleth2.xml is saved, it
will reload. Is this a setting in the OS or IIS manager that somehow got
turned on? Or a function of 2.4.3? 

 

Any assistance is sincerely appreciated!

 

Anna

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