Occasional problem with InCommon metadata refreshes

[Brian Koehmstedt]

On 6/26/2014 5:15 PM, Cantor, Scott wrote:
> On 6/26/14, 4:20 PM, "Brian Koehmstedt" <bkoehmstedt at ucmerced.edu> wrote:
>
>> When this happens, Shib IdP appears to me to act like it has loaded a
>> 0-byte InCommon metadata file, where it doesn't find any InCommon SP
>> metadata.
> That's never happened to me, ever, so I have to think it's something
> environmental. I've seen it once in maybe 3 years actually stop
> refreshing, which some other people have reported, but I've never had it
> dump the valid copy.
>

Thanks Scott.  This morning I switched to the HTTP-backed metadata 
provider as you and Tom recommended.

Again I had problems that were almost identical to what I originally 
reported.  The log reports successful metadata load from 
md.incommon.org, but then none of the Incommon services worked and I had 
to back out the change and restart.  After I did that, it worked again.

Totally perplexing.  I'm starting to suspect environment as well but I 
have (almost) zero proof that anything is wrong with the infrastructure.

One thing I did just notice on my test VM that's almost identical to 
production:  After I restarted with http-backed  provider,  I did a 
directory listing on the backing file, and it was indeed 0 bytes.  I did 
it a couple minutes later, and it was 10MB.  Ok, no big deal, it was 
probably just downloading still when I did the first dir listing and 
noticed the 0 byte file.

But I better confirm with you: If it takes the IdP say X number of 
seconds to download that 10MB, would I normally expect to see a 0-byte 
backing file while it's downloading?  Or is this evidence something 
environmental is wrong with the filesystem?