Problem with IIS 7.5 and latest Shibboleth SP installation utility (after uninstall/reinstall)

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/11/14, 1:49 PM, "Haer, Neelam" <nklhaer at mail.ubc.ca> wrote:

>The second re-installation did not install the filters to IIS, and
>manually adding the filters has no effect (ie, the Shibboleth SP filter
>is not kicking in upon access to my secured pages).  The Handler Mapping
>was installed automatically though.  I have
> tried a few times to uninstall/re-install but to no avail.

Well, I can't say what it's doing, but IIS is like this, it's a horrible
little troll of a web server. You have to keep poking it to get the filter
installed, basically. The main problem is when you don't have familiarity
with the IIS internals, but if you understand the filter and handler
pages, that's mostly what you need, it's just a matter of twisting it into
submission.

>Basically:  the problem is that no matter how many times I
>uninstall/re-install the Shibboleth SP, it does not install the filter to
>IIS and manually adding the filter has NO effect (ie, pages are not
>secured).

I suspect that the metabase layer is maybe trashed at this point. Maybe it
will help to uninstall the IIS 6 piece and work on manually configuring it
at that point. There really is nothing much to configure, just the filter
and the handler.

You should also note that many IIS servers will simply NOT work with the
filter installed globally. It often has to be installed per-site to work.
The fact that this situation is completely non-deterministic is one of
IIS' charms.

>Has anyone experienced this issue before?  And is there a resolution for
>this?

I have run into many IIS servers that are a horrible pain to configure in
various ways because their admin tools are simply broken. The only real
resolution is Apache. I did the best I can do given the need, at the time,
to be compatible back to IIS 4. It's possible that a module specific to
IIS 7 will be more well behaved, but there are no resources to work on
that right now.

-- Scott