Stanford is currently a member of two trust federations: our own FarmFed and InCommon.
- If a given SP (service provider website) is a member of InCommon, there is no metadata exchange necessary and you only need to find out what the entityID it is using and review if the default attribute release policy suffices and register the entityID with Stanford Service Provider Database (SPDB)
- If the SP is not a member of InCommon, then we exchange metadata, effectively adding the SP to FarmFed. Joining FarmFed Federations is a self-help service via the Service Provider Database (SPDB) .
- All SPs federated with Stanford IdPs via SPDB are entitled to the default attribute release. Per data owner's approval, only Stanford staff, faculty and students can register SP in Stanford SPDB.
Guidelines on entityID
The EntityID is a unique identifier, identifying each Service Provider and Identity Provider. Please follow these guidelines:
- Use an entityID of the form https://#service-host-name#/ ,or https://#service-host-name#/shibboleth. (e.g. https://fooapp.stanford.edu/shibboleth)
- In cases where the service host name (e.g. elearning.example.org) is different from the system name (e.g. web-host27.example.org), always use the service host name.
- Avoid using volatile system names (e.g. https://pod-12345.foo.com) which changes after reboot/rebuild.
- entityID should not change if you switch hosts.
