trivial shibd questions

[Allan West]

On 2016/07/25 09:24, Cantor, Scott wrote:
>> First, is there a file where one can change the text of the shibd
>> ListenerException error, to make it say something like:
>>       This particular web server has a problem...
>>
>> instead of saying something about shib that users don't understand,
>> which in turn makes many people say, "Shibboleth is down!" That
>> statement is beginning to sound like "The internet is broken!" in terms
>> of frequency, nebulousness, and incorrectness.
> If you mean change the message, not easily, though I think it's possible to do some hard-wired testing against the error message itself if it came to that, in the error templates. The messages have never been pulled out of the code, it's too much work and there's no standard way to do it in C++ that's cross-platform.
I was hoping there was a language-specific en_us file, or something easy.

> Also, I disagree to some degree, in that a) it doesn't mean the web server is down, and b) it at least provides an explicit cause that an administrator can respond to. But that's a personal view.
You know that it means the web server has a problem, and I know that the 
web server has a problem, but when a user calls the help desk and says, 
"I got a shibboleth error," no one in Tier 1 knows that the web server 
has a problem. If it were exposed to edit locally, I would probably make 
the error say something like:


Please include the following message in any email:

shibsp::ListenerException at
( ${SITE} )

This server cannot connect to shibd process, a site administrator should 
be notified this web server needs attention.


Yes, I use "this server" twice, but that's kind of the point for 
diagnosis - it's the web server not the shibboleth infrastructure. For 
purely political reasons, clarifying down to the user level what 
problems are NOT shibboleth infrastructure is becoming increasingly 
important.

> It's also not a common condition. If this happens with any frequency, you have a problem in your environment to fix.
Yes, our newest apache cluster has a problem, which was exposed while 
everyone was driving home between 5:00 and 6:00 pm last Friday. The lag 
in response caused many people to think we had a Shibboleth Outage, when 
in fact we did not.

> Second, are the developers aware that the current default error text
> misspells "administrator":
> Well, if I was, it would have been fixed...
>
>> I note that the misspelling has persisted since shibd v1
> That sort of makes me sad to fix it.
>
> -- Scott

Yes, but on the other hand, leaving it for hysterical raisins is never 
the best choice.

What are 'hysterical raisins', you ask? They used to be some (perhaps 
valid) historical reasons for doing things, but they have morphed into a 
canonical Right Way that carries forward far beyond the time when the 
reasons might have been valid, and are lost in the misty depths of our 
collective past. A former supervisor coined the term, to represent silly 
things we do without questioning, or really unerstanding why we do them. 
 >8^)

If/when you happen to edit the source for the typo, feel free to modify 
the error text as you see fit. Maybe local error text files could be a 
feature request for shibd v3.
Thanks, Allan