Switching platform for Shibboleth IdP and SP

[Peter Schober]

* Feinstein, Moses <moses.feinstein at touro.edu> [2020-12-20 16:55]:
> Currently we have Shibboleth IdP 4.0.1 running on CentOS 8, which is
> no longer supported by Red Hat.

Not sure it's useful to imply it was "supported" by IBM before but
it's an upstream to RHEL8 now, no longer a downstream.
I guess the real question is how the wider community (not limited to
Shib IDP deployer) will react to that.

> We are looking to migrate to anther preferably free distribution.
> 
> Beside going with RHEL licensed version, are there any free Linux
> distribution that have been tested by community running Shib IdP
> 4.0.1?

Debian's Java at least is "partally supported":
https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/IDP4/SystemRequirements

Debian "stable" has served us well for over a decade now (going well
beyond the age of IDPv4, of course). It's also the default/recommended
IDP platform in a few European academic identity federations, meaning
the IDP is deployed there in the hundreds.

Also, Debian "stable" has always supplied usable OpenJDK (7, 8, then
11) and in recent times even Jetty (currently 9.4) and Tomcat (7, 8,
now 9) versions. (Which may just have been a fortunate alignment by
chance, of course, and doesn't say anything about the future, with the
next Debian release becoming "stable" in half a year or so.)

Not that the Shib project cares much for distribution-supplied/packaged
servlet containers (though I personally have had nothing but good
experiences, or at least can't remember any others anymore)...

-peter