Call for Community Testing: 3.9.5 CAS

What is a "Call for Community Testing"?

A Call for Community Testing is a mechanism to notify our users that new Globus code is available for testing in the field. Through these calls, the Globus Alliance hopes to expose its code to a wide variety of usage scenarios early in its development process. The ultimate goals are to catch bugs that have historically been found only after final releases, and to elicit feedback from the community on ways our software can be improved.

Participating in the CAS Testing Call is easy!

  1. Optional: Consider sending mail to testing@globus.org to let us know that you're helping out and describing what you intend to test.
  2. Install the software in a non-production environment. Use the 3.9.5 distribution from http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/development/; the code can also be retrieved directly from CVS using the tag [tag].
  3. Exercise the software.
  4. Log your experiences in http://bugzilla.globus.org/globus/ under the "[component]" product. Please mention 3.9.5 explicitly in the body of the report.
  5. Optional: Consider sending descriptions of your tests to testing@globus.org so that we might use them to build standard tests in the future.
  6. If you have any questions or comments about the process, send an email to testing@globus.org.
  7. If you have any questions or comments regarding this component, join the gt4-friends list to participate in discussions with other testers. (To subscribe, send an email to majordomo@globus.org containing the words "subscribe gt4-friends" in the message body.)

Testing period

The testing period for this call is December 17 - January 31 2005.

About CAS

CAS allows a virtual organization to express policy regarding resources distributed across a number of sites. A CAS server issues assertions to the virtual organization users, granting them fine-grained access rights to resources. Servers recognize and enforce the assertions. CAS is designed to be extensible to multiple services and is currently supported by the GridFTP server.

Reasons for testing CAS

  • We need volunteers to exercise CAS to discover performance and scalability problems as well as volunteers to closely inspect CAS from a security perspective. Since CAS serves as a central point for a VO's authorization decisions security and scalability issues are extemely important to discover early.
  • We need volunteers for CAS to discover functionality and usability problems. Improving usability and functionality will make the software easier to use and develop with.

Technology dependencies

The CAS service depends on the following GT components:

  • WS Authentication and Authorization
  • Java WS Core

The CAS GridFTP authorization module depends on the following GT components:

  • Pre-WS Authentication and Authorization

The CAS service depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • OpenSAML

The CAS GridFTP authorization module depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • libxml

Environment/build parameters and other special conditions to test

  1. Use of various JVMs
  2. Administrative interface for granting/revoking rights
  3. Query interface, specifically assertion generation
  4. Various client tools.