SP Socket error on daemon start at boot

[Peter Schober]

* Zellober, Lutz <Lutz.Zellober at verw.uni-hamburg.de> [2011-09-21 09:29]:
> When the shibd is started by the init script an error message is
> dropped ( see bottom).

> 2011-09-20 13:22:04 ERROR XMLTooling.ParserPool : fatal error on
> line 0, column 0, message: An exception occurred!
> Type:NetAccessorException, Message:Could not connect to the socket
> for URL
> 'https://www.aai.dfn.de/fileadmin/metadata/DFN-AAI-Test-metadata.xml'

> When I start the daemon as root (also using the init script)
> everything works fine.

Do you need to go though a proxy to reach the DFN metadata from your
machine (and does root already have its environment set up to use a
proxy)? Try this for example:

$ curl -O https://www.aai.dfn.de/fileadmin/metadata/DFN-AAI-Test-metadata.xml
vs.
$ NO_PROXY="*" curl -O https://www.aai.dfn.de/fileadmin/metadata/DFN-AAI-Test-metadata.xml

Or, if you don't have the curl binary installed but have wget, try:
$ wget https://www.aai.dfn.de/fileadmin/metadata/DFN-AAI-Test-metadata.xml
vs.
$ wget --no-proxy https://www.aai.dfn.de/fileadmin/metadata/DFN-AAI-Test-metadata.xml

If you've set up root's environment to use a proxy this would also be
inherited to child processes such as starting the shibd manually.

If that's indeed the case here's the documentation for the Shib SP:
https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/NativeSPTransportOption
-peter