Automated Shib login for monitoring

[Wessel, Keith]

All,

I've been tasked with collecting performance and availability numbers for our IDP nodes which gave me reason to do something I've been wanting to do for a while: write a better monitor for Shib than just using the status URL.

I started my work by writing a Perl script that, using LWP, hits an SP's login URL and goes through the IDP login process. It's not pretty, but it almost works.

However, depending on an SP to initiate the process adds some variables that I'd rather avoid: more latency and depending on the SP to be up, just to name a couple.

I'd like to actually have my code generate the SAML request and process the response, making sure it's getting back valid attributes.

First, does this seem like a sane line of thinking?

Secondly, are there any good resources out there for knowing exactly what I'm going to need to do for request and response handling short of reading the SP source code?

Thanks,
Keith