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This document is not expected to be used by ordinary users. It has a slightly higher level of technical content, but everything is explained and it requires no special background. You must be an administrator of your own desktop test computer. The process is fairly simple, but it involves making a temporary administrative change to a laptop or desktop computer under your control. You add one line to a system file, test, and then restore the original version of the file. It doesn't matter what computer you use, so if you don't like doing this on your important machine, find something that boots up at all and run the test there.
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So the only thing you need to change do is the Browser, although to make this particular change it is best to change a system file on the computer on which the Browser is runningto configure the Browser on a desktop machine that "auth.yale.edu" is the name of the Pre-Production server instead of the name of the Production server. You do not need to change any of the servers or applications, just the client desktop.
But is it Shibboleth?
When a Browser goes to any "https://" URL, the server at the other end has to have a Certificate and Key that proves that it is the computer with the name the Browser expected to talk to. The Certificate and key of Yale servers are protected by ITS, but we can install the same files on two different network addresses as long as we control both of them and they do the same thing.
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