Clarification of failFastInitialization Metadata Option

[Rising, Matt]

Recently we had a service provider whose MetadataProvider type is FileBackedHTTPMetadataProvider send us bad metadata-which caused the entire IdP to fail after a metadata reload.  Our natural question was "How do we prevent a single service provider from crashing the entire IDP?" which led us to the failFastInitialization=false option.

However, the documentation on the option states "operations that require valid metadata will fail" and Scott notes in this thread (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.shibboleth.user/33630) that using the option will result in "your IdP will start up fine and then services will just fail to work randomly."

This begs the question:  What is the failFastInitialization=false MetadataProvider option actually used for?  It seems as though it's just a switch between "fail now, massively" or "fail later in a weird, less-diagnosable way."  Testing the option on IdP V3 shows that the IdP does start, but then not even the /idp/status page will.

So, not just operations for that service provider that provided bad metadata will fail, but any function that references metadata in any way will fail?

Matt Rising
Towson University



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://shibboleth.net/pipermail/users/attachments/20160310/2ba682db/attachment-0001.html>