[saml-dev] SAML Interop Prep for Catalyst Europe

[Don Bowen <don.bowen@sun.com>]

Well, it is hard for me to believe it, but most of us will be leaving for
Munich in a little more than 2 weeks! Wow.

This, in my opinion, will be at least as challenging as the last one in SF.

- We have less time
- Many, if not all, of the products have probably changed (some significantly)
- Language and power sources are quite a bit different :-)
- We won't have easy access to local offices ;-)

So, this is an attempt to get us discussing what we need to consider, prepare and do over the next two weeks.

Here are the details about networking at the hotel we will be staying at (from Jason Lewis):

Internet connectivity: ISDN in every room (bedroom and meeting room) - of course you will need an ISDN modem that is
compatible with European standards. You will also need an account with an ISP with a POP in Munich. I've been told that
you will get approximately 128 kbit/s, but the performance is variable. Burton will not be providing wireless networking in
Munich - we couldn't get Deutsche Telekom to bring anything big enough into the hotel. Each time you make a connection to
the Internet, you will be charged a 3 Euro dialing fee so you will be better off keeping the connection live all day. UUNET and
PSINET both provide accounts with unlimited access for a flat monthly rate. Both ISPs have Munich POPs.

He also had this to say about equipment:

If you need me to provide any kind of equipment, I need to know by this Friday. I have an absolute hard deadline here since
we have to ship everything on Monday. If we don't make this window, there is a CompUSA-like store in Munich that carries
most networking gear and you can buy equipment there.

I will be happy to provide a hub and cables for a LAN, but don't expect Internet connectivity for every system on the LAN. It is
possible to share an ISDN connection, but it just doesn't work very well.

I don't think we need internet connectivity because I don't think it is worth the hassle. Is this going to be a problem for anyone? I would like him to provide 2 8-port switches. Do you think that will be enough? I think we should all bring long cables for our gear.

I would like to know what each of you is planning to bring in terms of equipment. I know for Sun, we are going to use laptops and hopefully monitors that will be used in the Sun booth the next night. Obviously laptop monitors are not the best, but they seem acceptable to me and I can understand why people would not want to ship big monitors. Given the physical logistics I believe laptops will suffice. Thoughts?

We will need certs from a CA so if Irving is going to reenact his service from Catalyst USA that would be great. We will also need a DNS server or maybe we just get by with local hosts files. I'm leaning toward the latter, but if someone wants to volunteer to provide what RSA did last time please speak up. I believe we should use the same IP address assignments that we did in SF.

Prateek, we should have all vendors review the last copy of the document we used in SF and verify that they will still comply with everything in it.

Obviously we won't have any dry runs this time so it will be important for all of us to be ready to start testing on Monday morning 9/23. I asked Phil Schacter about whether we needed to be ready to do a press briefing on Tuesday morning and he said that nothing is currently planned.

This email is not meant to be exhaustive, just to get the discussions started. I would like to suggest that we have a conference call early next week, say Monday or Tuesday at 12pm EDT/11am CDT/9am PDT. Alternatively, we could shoot for 5pm EDT/4pm CDT/2pm PDT - same days. Scheduling all of us will be difficult, but if we can get representation from most companies for a specific time slot we should do it.

It would be nice to have replies to this from at least one representative for each of the 8 vendors to say when they would like to have the call, who will participate and how many lines they would need.

Don;

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