eduGAIN SG - June 2020

eduGAIN Steering Group Meeting

Tuesday 16th June, 16:30 UTC (in your timezone)

Please Note that the above time is CONFIRMED.

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Attendance

Federations in Attendance (xx)

1. ...

Attendees (xx)

1. Casper Dreef, GÉANT
2. Davide Vaghetti, IDEM/GARR
3. Terry Smith, AAF
4. Nicole Harris, GÉANT
5. ..

Apologies (xx)

1. ....

Notes

Welcome, Introductions & Agenda Agreement

The Chair welcomed everyone to the 4rd meeting of 2019 ...

See the Open Actions & Previous Meeting notes. The major open action will be covered within the meeting.

Minutes of the previous meeting were approved. All action remain open.

Membership Updates and Joining

For details on new members and candidates see https://technical.edugain.org/status and work on progressing new members is underway.

Four (4) federations participated in eduGAIN since the last meeting.

Four (4) candidates currently under assessment.

• China / CSTCloud Federation - 18-Oct-2019
• Slovakia / safeID - 24-Oct-2019
• Mexico / FENIX - 21-Nov-2019
• Tajikistan / TARENA Identity Federation - 28-Nov-2019

eduGAIN Operation Processes

• Modification of production systems
• Summary of the deployment of profile v2

Documentation: eduGAIN Operations - SAML

Thomas and Davide explainend that the beta feed will be removed after implementation to avoid confusing. Should probably renamed in e.g. testing feed. This is different than preproduction.
Chris seconded the idea of having a test and preproduction feed. This will be benefiting the smaller federations that don't have the resources to run tests themselves.

eduGAIN Town Hall

• https://eventr.geant.org/events/3250.
• 24th - 25th March, Stockholm.
• Send topic ideas to the eduGAIN-SG list.

Possibly in March 2020, but needing to include topics broader than just eduGAIN to justify travel + wider participation (to include eduroam, possibly REFEDS WGs, invite FIM4R, FIM4L, possibly some “CAMP” type sessions). This will be coordinated by Casper Dreef and was broadly supported. A Town Hall hasn't been convened since 2017, the end of 2018 event was skipped because of the preparation of the GN4-3 project. This event is to have a global focus to better support transcontinental travel.

eduGAIN "baselining"

The eduGAIN Compliance Issues wiki page has been updated but required more attention and this is an ongoing process.

• Countries in Europe with no Federation, currently only available for Europe, extend to all regions?

Validator report at https://technical.edugain.org/profile_v2 now shows:

• 1 red (non-compliant) -MATE.  Belnet and WAYF moved to green, Oman KID moved to yellow
• 32 yellow (partially compliant) - previously 44 decrease of 12
• 35 green (fully compliant) - previously 15 increase of 20

The AAF and 32 other federations situation include issues with logo requirement for discovery. Pål also highlighted the logo issue as not being important. Rhys stated that priority needs to be with the RED (non-compliant) issues. Davide explained that the eduGAIN Support team is able to contact federations to work on these issues.

Identifying those with more than logo issues could provide the next tranche to address, maybe an Orange group for those with more that missing logos?

Three Baseline meetings took place over the last couple of months. You can find the notes here: https://wiki.refeds.org/display/GROUPS/Baseline+Expectations+Working+Group

Resolving eduGAIN issues

R&S, SIRTFI, baselining, validators and the many other tools are all helping to resolve and even prevent issues occuring for a researcher in one federation seamlessly accessing a service on the other side of the planet. When it all works great!

But when it doesn't determining the fault can be complex. Issues include;

• federation and organisation policies
• awareness
• working across many organisational and national boundaries
• working across time zones

Simple guidance for commuities communicating issues and identifying parties that need to be involved?

Improving awareness for organisations and federations interoperating and particularly sharing and tracking the issues and the solutions.

Terry provided an example of a R&S service within Australia having difficulty working with a UK Federation identity provider not supporting R&S. Liaising with Jisc has been useful as they want to promote R&S within their federation. Chris Phillips highlighted that there are services that required SIRTFI in addition to R&S and sometimes these issues are urgent or conveying the importance and urgency doesn't always pass between support functions. Davide highlighted that the resolution time can often be in the order of weeks. Davide to provide statistics on eduGAIN support topics/issues for the next meeting.

Who and how to provide guidance is an open issue for a different forum.

Future meetings

The dates for the next SG meetings and Drop-in sessions will be shared in due course.

It was agreed to allocate some time in SG meetings to give an update on the Drop-in sessions.

The next SG meeting was confirmed to take place on Tuesday 10th December 2019 13:00 UTC Drop in sessions:

• 15th October *Asia* 7:00 UTC / 9:00 Amsterdam / 00:00 Los Angeles / 3:00 Washington / 18:00 Sydney
       - https://timeanddate.com/s/3skv

• 12th November *Americas* 20:00 UTC / 21:00 Amsterdam / 12:00 Los Angeles / 15:00 Washington / 07:00 Sydney
       - https://timeanddate.com/s/3skw

Terry highighted some topics from the previous drop in sessions:

• Need for usage statistics is major driver of FIM4L and displacing EZproxy.
  
• Service Catalogue (although there is a range of work groups on this topic).

Chris raised the issue of discussion documents on service catalogue. Terry highlighted emerging federations needing a service catalogue to point people toward a service - in a follow-up email he also flagged REFEDS Service Catalogue Best Practices and 2018 REFEDS Workplan. Pål highlighted the fact that with more than 3000 SPs within eduGAIN it is difficult to curate and maintain a list. Terry highlighted the desire of service providers to provide good information to encourage update of their service. Chris flagged the importance of a service might differ between federations.

AoB and Close

What to do with non-compliant federations? Should we remove them from the participants list and demote them to membership or create a 'suspended' list?

Further discussions in future SG meetings and T&I Town Hall.

Davide anounced the SG on the creation of eduGAIN security team as part of the wider support team. By the end of the year documentation will be published and shared with the eduGAIN community.
Thomas Bärecke prepared a report on the eduGAIN support tickets. The report will be published soon.

The meeting was closed at 15:02 CET.