As a courtesy, we monitor the reachability of the various South African identity providers and make that information available at monitor.safire.ac.za. The monitoring system initiates a single sign-on request, and reports the outcome as follow: Green means that we completed all the tests and found something that looked like a login page. Yellow means that we got as far as what we think should be a login page, but didn’t find a username field on it. The institution’s own monitoring or I.T. help desk may be able to provide more information. Red means that we weren’t able to contact the identity provider for some reason. This could be because there’s a network problem or that the there’s some problem with the identity provider (service not running, certificates expired, metadata expired, etc). The monitoring output shows the hosts we passed through on the way to what we believe is the login page. It may also give details of any problem(s) that were encountered. …