Data Connector failover behavior

[David Bantz]

Background:

One recent Monday the primary AD server used for both authN and LDAP attribute retrieval was unaccountably off-line.  Fortunately we have sufficient redundancy and failover configuration in the IdP that the effect on production authN & attribute release was effectively nil.  

Unaware that this AD instance was off-line, I restarted a non-production IdP to implement configuration changes, and discovered the IdP would not start because it could not bind to the AD server.   Error messages referred to the attribute-resolver, not login.config, indicating it was the Data Connector failure that aborted startup.   So despite having enough redundancy and fail-over configuration to keep serving, the IdP would nevertheless fail to start up.  

I was, shockingly enough, the first user of this AD server to report the outage.

Questions:

Am I correct in reporting that the IdP will not start of an LDAP Data Connector cannot bind to the directory?  Even if a properly configured failover connector is configured?

Is there some other configuration tweak I can or should be using to prevent an IdP failure to start in a similar abnormal situation (LDAP off-line)?

It's surely right to warn me that I'm attempting to start an IdP that cannot successfully bind one of the Data Connectors, but would it be reasonable to enable the IdP process to start and do what it can with configured failover and redundancy?

David Bantz