To apply to join the SDSS federation as a target, e-mail edina@ed.ac.uk (the EDINA helpdesk) and ask for your message to be forwarded to the SDSS team. In the e-mail, please include the following, which includes all the information we will need to fill in your <DestinationSite> entry in the federation metadata (see http://sdss.ac.uk/fed/sdss-sites-12.xml for examples):

  • Provider type: State that you are applying to be a target.
  • Policy: A brief statement agreeing to operate in accordance with the SDSSFederationPolicy.
  • Alias: A short name to identify your site (which may just be your project acronym).
  • Technical contact: A technical contact name and Email address. These can identify either an individual person or a group mailing list within your organisation. Notification of future developments in the Federation, particularly changes that may require you to reconfigure your software to maintain connectivity with other members, will be sent to this Email address, which should therefore be monitored regularly.
  • Admin contact: An optional administrative contact name and Email address (if different from the technical one). At present, both contacts receive the same notifications.
  • Entity ID: This must be a URI identifying your service provider. If your service provider is already a member of any other federation then please give its existing entity ID, even if it appears to be federation-specific. If your service provider is not already a member of another federation, please consult EntityIDPolicy for details on the process of constructing a new entity ID.
  • SHIRE Location: One or more assertion consumer service (SHIRE) URLs, e.g., https://shibbox.uni.ac.uk/Shibboleth.shire. Using default port numbers will sidestep firewall problems but is not mandatory.
  • SHAR Name: The full X.509 Distinguished Name from the attribute requester (SHAR) certificate, e.g., CN=shibbox.uni.ac.uk, OU=XYZ Project, O=JISC Core Middleware Programme, C=GB.
  • OrganizationURL: The URL of a web page providing a description of the organization applying to join the Federation.

We will let you know by e-mail once the Federation metadata has been updated to include the information you supplied. You will then need to download the new metadata and modify your Shibboleth configuration to match it, as described at SetupServiceProvider.