Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey uses CAS and is a core contributor to the JA-SIG CAS efforts.

Using Proxy CAS, for uPortal channels to remote services.

The Rutgers portal is load balanced between two JVMs on different hosts. When they initially tried Proxy CAS, the setup would not work since the CasProxyCallbackUrl would route to a random JVM when sent through the load balancer (mod_jk).

To work around this they set up virtual directories in Apache and mapped them to individual "jvm_routes" based on a URL that encoded the hostname like so:

CasProxyCallbackUrl = https://my.rutgers.edu/{hostname}/CasProxyServlet

This was CAS server called back to the appropriate JVM.

While this works in production, having to code the server names into the CAS proxy callback URL doesn't seem ideal. It has been suggested that client certificates could solve this problem by eliminating the need for mutual authentication via https callbacks. Rutgers (and the CAS discussion list!) welcome thoughts about this.

William G. Thompson, Jr. is the Rutgers CAS technical contact.