At 00:00 SAST on 1 August 2017, the remaining entities in the old metadata aggregate at

https://discservice.sanren.ac.za/safire.xml

will expire. Any provider who still has mention of the above URL in their configuration should remove it, as it will not be supported beyond the end of the month.

As you’re no doubt aware, SAFIRE has been transitioning architectures from the original full-mesh pilot to a hub-and-spoke Federation. For some time we’ve had transitional arrangements in place to minimise the impact of this change on users. Initially, both federations operated in parallel, and more recently all full-mesh service providers were provisionally imported into the hub-and-spoke Federation (albeit with some restrictions).

A few months ago we updated the transition plan to set deadlines for the transition of both identity- and service-providers. The deadline on identity providers passed at the end of June, and the deadline on service providers is the end of July 2017. All affected providers have been contacted individually using the best available contact information we have for them and should have been aware of the impact of these deadlines for some time.

We’d like to thank those providers who have completed the transition successfully, and also welcome the new providers who joined the Federation after this started. TENET would also like to thank its colleagues at the SANReN Competency Area who’ve facilitated the transition by maintaining the old discovery service.