Load Balancing and Sticky Sessions

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/26/13 4:31 PM, "Brian Reindel" <brian at reindel.com> wrote:

>Does the IdP require sticky sessions on an Apache load balanced
>environment in order for an authenticated user to maintain their
>existing session? If yes, is it possible to swap the in-memory
>management of authenticated users and service providers to a database
>model?

See https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/IdPClusterIntro

Short answers yes and with third party extensions.

I'd love to understand the value of a single point of failure moved to
another spot in terms of impact on maintenance (that's a serious question,
I'm still trying to understand the point of it).

Active/passive, load permitting, seems more viable to me than a database
or memcache if you ever want to patch without downtime.

(Though of course I do the stateless thing myself, allowing that I can't
do certain things with it)

-- Scott