The South African Identity Federation (SAFIRE) acts as a broker (middleman) in your login process. Because it doesn’t control either your identity provider or the service you’re logging into, it is not in a position to provide any direct assistance for login problems.

If you’re having difficulty logging into sites through SAFIRE, you should generally contact your home institution (the organisation who’s account you’re logging in with). Their IT help desk should always be your first port of call. You may be able to find contact details from them by looking at their entry in the list of identity providers. Alternatively, you could try your institution’s website.

Cannot log into any SAFIRE-enabled site

You can use SAFIRE’s test service provider to test logins. This should accept logins from any valid identity provider and display all the attributes your identity provider sends about you. Thus it is a useful way of testing your account works.

If you cannot log into any SAFIRE-enabled website or service (including the test service provider), or you get errors about your username or password, account expiry, etc then the problem is almost certainly at your home institution. You should give your help desk the full and exact wording of any error message(s) you see.

Your cell phone camera is a useful way of recording error messages for the help desk.

Cannot log into a single service

If it is just a single service that you cannot log in, look carefully at the error message. It is possible that the reason you cannot access the service is that it is a paid-for or subscription service that your home organisation has not (yet) signed up for.

Alternatively, there could be a problem with either the service or your home institution. Your home IT help desk should be able to help you work out which it is. You should tell them which service you were trying to log into (the address of the website you want to access). You also need to give them the full and exact wording of any error message(s) you see. Again, your cell phone camera is a useful way of recording error messages for the help desk.

Changed your mind about sending information to a Service Provider

When you first log into a service provider, we let you know what personal information will be sent to that provider. We record that you’ve seen the transfer notice in a cookie so that your next login is quicker and we won’t show you the notice again for about three months. However, you control how your personal information is handled and you can withdraw the record for any service provider at any time by clearing or deleting any cookies we’ve set in your browser.

We provide a way for you to clear the transfer notice cookies.

If you want to delete other cookies set by us, under your browser’s advanced Internet setting you can clear or delete individual cookies or all the cookies that your browser has stored. Here’s how to do it in several common browsers:

Problems with SAFIRE itself

If you believe there’s a problem with SAFIRE itself, please let your home institution’s IT helpdesk know. They should get your institution’s authorised representative(s) to log a call with our service operations centre. (Unfortunately, for security and privacy reasons we can only accept reports from the authorised representative(s).)