CLARIN Central Discovery Service

The CLARIN central discovery service is based on DiscoJuice (version 1.0), see: ​http://discojuice.org/.

The goal is to provide an easy to use discovery service for all CLARIN service providers. By using the same discovery service users do not have to re-login or re-select their IDP when switching between service providers. A drawback of the central discovery service is the fact that it introduce a single point of failure (SPOF). Currently we are looking into ways to make this central discovery service high availability.

Status

The CLARIN central discojuice WAYF service is currently operating as a beta service.

Currently used at the catalog.clarin.eu SPs, like the component registry: ​http://catalog.clarin.eu/ds/ComponentRegistry/ (click on login)

Roadmap

• We plan to release version 1 of the CLARIN central discojuice WAYF service around Christmas 2011.
• Look into high availability options.
• Upgrade to DiscoJuice 2.0

Configuration

How to use discojuice as your shibboleth WAYF?

1. Get access to a discojuice WAYF:
   1. Host discojuice yourself (see ​http://discojuice.org for installation instructions).
   2. Use an external hosted discojuice WAYF service (​http://catalog.clarin.eu/discojuice/idp.html provided by CLARIN).
2. Configure a login endpoint in your SP configuration to use the discojuice WAYF service ( either 1a or 1b ), see the next section for more details.
3. Use this new login endpoint

DiscoJuice login endpoint

In order to use discojuice as the WAYF service, a session initiator needs to be configured in the SPs 'shibboleth2.xml' configuration file. The 'Location' attribute specifies the login endpoint you can use to append to your handler url (/Shibboleth.sso by default) to start a shibboleth session. The 'URL' attribute of the session initiator of type 'SAMLDS' should point to the discojuice installation you want to use.

A restart of the SP is required after changing the 'shibboleth2.xml' configuration file.

Example using the CLARIN provided discojuice WAYF:

<SessionInitiator type="Chaining" Location="/DiscoJuice" id="DiscoJuice" relayState="cookie">
     <SessionInitiator type="SAML2" defaultACSIndex="1" acsByIndex="false" template="bindingTemplate.html"/>
     <SessionInitiator type="Shib1" defaultACSIndex="5"/>
     <SessionInitiator type="SAMLDS" URL="http://catalog.clarin.eu/discojuice/idp.html"/>
 </SessionInitiator>