<Incomplete, but the existing information is correct>
Environments
- Production - domain is seamlessaccess.org
- Beta & staging - domain is thiss.io
SeamlessAccess Services
- The Discovery Service – service.seamlessaccess.org
- Metadata Query Service– md.seamlessaccess.org
- Thiss Beta Discovery Service – use.thiss.io
- Thiss Beta Metadata Query Service – md.thiss.io
- Demo of the service in production - https://demo.seamlessaccess.org/
- Demo of the service in Beta - https://demo.beta.seamlessaccess.org
Overview of the Structure
The agreegated picture is here Seamless Access Deployment Architecture
Production
We have four sites in production currently.
- SUNET's own infrastructure in Stockholm
- Safespring's infrastructure in Stockholm
- Amazon Web Service in Frankfurt, Germany
- Amazon Web Service in North California, USA
We have one Load balaner, two thiss-js servers, two MDQ servers and one Medata Agreegator & Publisher server per site. They are all virtual machines managed by SUNET but has both geographic and network redundancy.
The relationship between these servers in combination with the services in Fastly are described in below diagrams. More details follow for each of these components further in this documentation.
service.seamlessaccess.org
md.seamlessaccess.org
Beta
The number of servers and sites in Beta enviornment are limited but has the same relationship between them as Production.
use.thiss.io
md.thiss.io
Prerequisites for management & troubleshooting
- Write access to the ops repostiory https://github.com/TheIdentitySelector/thiss-ops/tree/master/global
Knowledge of SUNET's puppet & cosmos structure https://wiki.sunet.se/display/sunetops/Cosmos
External Component
Fastly
Fastly is CDN (content delivery network) provider. We use CDN to provide greater rechability by take advantage of their cache nodes spread all over the world.
Services that are hosted in Fastly are
- md.seamlessaccess.org
- service.seamlessaccess.org
- use.thiss.io, md.thiss.io
- www.seamlessaccess.org
The configuration of these services reside here https://manage.fastly.com/services/all
Troubleshooting
- How to check cache for an URL-
https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/checking-cache, curl -I -H"Fastly-debug:1" https://service.seamlessaccess.org
- How to check cache in an Edge node of Fastly, you need to create an API key for this
curl -s "https://api.fastly.com/content/edge_check?url=https://service.seamlessaccess.org/990.js" -H 'Fastly-Key:xxx'
- Check origin latency for each service https://manage.fastly.com/configure/services/
- Check stats https://manage.fastly.com/observability/dashboard/system/overview/historic
Access
https://wiki.sunet.se/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=83493119
Internal Components
Aggregator & Publisher
Descripton & Troubleshooting
The servers with the name meta.*seamlessaccess.org run PyFF (https://pyff.io) in production environment. In Beta & Staging they are named a-*.thiss.io.
PyFF is short for python Federation Feeder - is a simple SAML metadata aggregator
In this environment, PyFF aggregates metadata from 3 federations - SWAMID, EduGAIN, InCommon & OpenAthens and publish them under /var/www/html/ using the script /usr/local/sbin/run-pyff running as a cronjob.
# Puppet Name: publish */30 * * * * /usr/local/bin/scriptherder --mode wrap --syslog --name publish -- /usr/local/sbin/run-pyff /opt/pyff/mdx.fd /var/www/html/metadata.json /var/www/html/metadata_sp.json
They aggreagate 'general' metadata in /var/www/html/metadata.json and SP trust metadata in /var/www/html/metadata_sp.json. They are created every 30 minutes by running PyFF in a docker container momentarily.
The script also checks manually the fingerprint on the metadata and PyFF does the same thing again.
Read details about the sources and certificates of federation metadata in SeamlessAccess Metadata Feeds.
The servers also runs Apache in a docker container service called sunet-md_publisher to expose and publish the metadata JSON files on port 443 which are accisible only by the servers running MDQ (md-*.seamlessaccess.org) belonging to the same site.
Mointoring
We monitor ages of all the metadata files in https://monitor.seamlessaccess.org/nagios3/. They are
- Metadta XML files for each federation in
/opt/pyff/metadata/ -
/var/www/html/metadata.json /var/www/html/metadata_sp.json.
Take help of the 'Description & Troubleshooting' section to troubleshoot the alarms.
Upgrade
- Both PyFF and
sunet-md_publisherare upgraded by chaging the versions inthiss-ops/global/overlay/etc/puppet/cosmos-rules.yaml.The puppet manifests for production, beta and staging are separate.
thiss::pyff_prod:
pyff_version: 2.1.3
output: /var/www/html/metadata.json
output_trust: /var/www/html/metadata_sp.json
thiss::md_publisher_prod:
watch: /var/www/html/metadata.json
watch_sp: /var/www/html/m
- After commiting and bump-taging the changes, run cosmos in the concerned servers, better to do it one at a time & check that the service is working.
- If PyFF is upgraded, run the aforementioned cronjob for PyFF to see that it doesn't show any error.
- You have to restart
sunet-md_publisherif you have upgraded the metdata publishing service. - Check https://monitor.seamlessaccess.org/nagios3/ for any alarms.
- The MDQ servers with the name m
d-*.seamlessaccess.orgshould be able to fetch the metadata from the Aggregator & Publisher servers. Make sure it is all 'green' for those servers too. - You can log in to the MDQ servers and run
/usr/local/bin/get_metadata.shand see that they are able to fetch metadata files without any issues. - As a last & final check, visit any SP for example wiki.sunet.se and see that it is possible to login using SA discovery service or check the login using https://demo.seamlessaccess.org/ for production upgrades and https://demo.beta.seamlessaccess.org for Beta upgrades.
MDQ
Descripton & Troubleshooting
The servers with the name md-.*seamlessaccess.org run thiss-mdq in production environment. In Beta & Staging they are named md-*.thiss.io.
The code for thiss-mdq lives here https://github.com/TheIdentitySelector/thiss-mdq.
The aggregator servers running PyFF expose their port 443 to MDQ servers. They run a cronjob that checks to see if there are changes in the metadata JSON files in the Aggregator servers, if there is, it updates the file in the docker container running thiss-mdq and restart it. The script also does a pre-check to see if the fetched metadata files are empty or not, if empty, it won't restart and risk exposing empty metadatas.
# Puppet Name: thiss__mdq_prod_fetch_metadata */5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/scriptherder --mode wrap --syslog --name thiss__mdq_prod_fetch_metadata -- /usr/local/bin/get_metadata.sh
The MDQ is a REST-like API for requesting and receiving arbitrary metadata. It exposes the metadata in the URL https://md.seamlessaccess.org/entities. The URL for beta is https://md.thiss.io/entities.
The servers run the MDQ service on port 80 which is open to the HAproxy load balancers with names md.*.seamlessaccess.org belonging to the same site.
Mointoring
We monitor the date when the metadata JSON files are last modified in both monitor.seamlessaccess.org and nagiosxi.nordu.net. The check warns if the metadata is 2 days old, it becomes critical if it is 2 days old.
We have this check on MDQ servers, HAproxy Load balancer server and on the top domain which is https://md.seamlessaccess.org.
A simple check on the URLs on each level will show information about the metadata. The one on MDQ server level can only be run locally from that server or from the HAproxy server belonging to the same site.
➜ ~ curl https://md.seamlessaccess.org
{"version":"1.5.8","start_time":"2025-11-22T00:35:20.300Z","metadata":{"last_modified":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.808Z","last_created":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.808Z","size":17502},"trust_metadata":{"last_modified":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.952Z","last_created":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.952Z","size":156}}%
➜ ~ curl -k https://md.ntx.sunet.eu.seamlessaccess.org
{"version":"1.5.8","start_time":"2025-11-22T00:35:03.460Z","metadata":{"last_modified":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.125Z","last_created":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.125Z","size":17502},"trust_metadata":{"last_modified":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.212Z","last_created":"2025-11-22T14:15:02.212Z","size":156}}%
: 14:19 root@md-1: ~ # curl -k http://localhost
{"version":"1.5.8","start_time":"2025-11-22T00:35:05.392Z","metadata":{"last_modified":"2025-11-22T14:15:03.281Z","last_created":"2025-11-22T14:15:03.281Z","size":17502},"trust_metadata":{"last_modified":"2025-11-22T14:15:03.409Z","last_created":"2025-11-22T14:15:03.409Z","size":156}}
Upgrade
Thiss-js
Descripton & Troubleshooting
Mointoring
Upgrade
HAproxy Load Balancer
Descripton & Troubleshooting
Mointoring
Upgrade
SeamlessAccess HAproxy Upgrade
Monitor
Descripton & Troubleshooting
Mointoring
Upgrade
Demo Application
Descripton & Troubleshooting
Mointoring
Upgrade
General Troubleshooting
Almost all services run in docker containers. They are addes as systemd units. The names start with sunet-*.
journalctl -fu <service name of the system unit>- Check
/var/log/syslogfor older logs docker logs -f <docker container name>service <service name of the system unit> restart
For deeper troubleshooting knowledge of SUNET's puppet & cosmos structure is needed as mentioned in the Prerequisites section above.
The puppet manifests that deploy and manage the internal components are found here https://github.com/TheIdentitySelector/thiss-ops/tree/master/global. Those who have write acces to it are mentioned here https://wiki.sunet.se/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=83493119
Use of SUNET INFRA cert
add details
SeamlessAccess SUNET INFRA cert update
Use of Fleetlock
Firewall Restriction
Access to Internal Components
https://wiki.sunet.se/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=83493119
Overall Monitoring
https://wiki.sunet.se/display/sunetops/Monitoring