The eduGAIN isFederated Check Service allows to find out if the organisations represented by a list of email addresses or domain names are already supporting federated login and if they are already participating in eduGAIN.
The EIFCS downloads federation metadata for all federations including eduGAIN. The list of federations is stored in a database table and has to be updated manually from time to time. Ideally, only federations are added that self-declare themselves as production federations. The metadata files for each federation then is parsed to filter out all descriptions of Identity Providers. Of particular interest are the domain names that are used fro the endpoints and scopes of the Identity Providers because these domain names then are used to determine if a an organisation is federated and eduGAIN-enabled. The same is also done for eduGAIN metadata.
Some federations use a so-called hub&spoke architecture where only one Identity Provider is listed in their local federation metadata. Sometime this IdP does not list scope elements (domain names) of those organisation that are connected to it. Therefore, in addition to parse this federation's metadata file, EIFCS also allows to run a federation-specific processing script which typically will download a HTML web page of that federation, which lists all organisations connected to that federation. If the listed organisations also contain a domain name or a contact address, this information then also can be parsed and associated with this particular federation.
The EIFCS consists of the following components:
The following things can happen or should be done from time to time:
Update federations Every few months, new federations might emerge. Those that consider themselves production federations, should be added to the EIFCS database. To add a new federation, add a new entry in the "Federations" table. An entry for a federation contains the following fields:
Federation metadata cannot be downloaded If the cron script cannot download federation metadata from a particular federation, an email is sent to the administrator of the host or the address configured in the MAILTO variable of the cron script. Often federation metadata is only temporarily not available. In these cases, just ignore the email notifications. If federation metadata is not available for more than a few days, this probably means its URL changed or the federation stopped being active. In these cases, the federation's data has to be updated in the database.
The software was developed with NetBeans 8.0. To design the database layout MySQLWorkbench was used initially.