configuration of shibboleth

[Peter Schober]

* Sunita Barve <sunitabarve at gmail.com> [2021-04-19 12:57]:
> 1. If we install shibboleth will it help us to get remote access to users
> through our institute proxy credentials?
> 2. How to install shibboleth on ubuntu-20.04
> 3. Is there any simple and step by step installation guide for ubuntu.
> 
> Our objective is to make our ejournals/databases available to users
> through their proxy credentials.

Ignoring the word "proxy" above (since I don't think it adds anything
useful to the discussion here): If you have a directory/database of
your local users (and their credentials) then yes, you can connect the
Shibboleth "Identity Provider" software to it to achieve remote access
to e-journales, etc. -- *provided* the resources you're interested in
themselfs provide the option of using SAML 2.0 WebSSO. (I.e., both
parties have to support and configure that.)

Not all publishers do, though most of the larger ones do.

You could still use the SSO capabilities of your Shibboleth IDP
together with e.g. EZproxy to provide seamless access also to
information providers that do not yet support SAML themselfs, though
that requires accesing those resources via your own EZproxy URL (not
directly at nature.com or whatever) so comes at its own cost of user
support/training.

The Shibboleth IDP software is written in Java so as long as you can
get a Java Virtual Machine and a Java Servlet Container running it
doesn't care much about the underlying OS. I personally haven't looked
at Ubuntu 20.04 LTS closely but my first impression was that it
(again) introduced new technologies that made the system behave
differently than previous releases (aka public beta test) -- but I
can't recall any details and YMMV.

The Shibboleth project itself provides the official documentation but
there are also third-party ones that can be found.

-peter