About
How to add Australian Access Federation (AAF) authentication to your account.
Who is this for?
Anyone with a user account on the forum who is a member of a subscriber organisation, which includes most Australian Universities.
Why should I do this?
AAF provides a service that allows you to login to the forum using your institutional credentials. This means that, you don’t need to manage yet another set of login credentials. AAF provides high quality affiliation data, and is a trusted source of identity.
Also, ACCESS-NRI is required to report broad metrics to our partners about how many of their stakeholders are using our service. This reporting is one way of demonstrating the value that ACCESS-NRI brings to the community.
How do I add AAF if I already have an account
If you already have an account on the forum you can easily add AAF authentication without affecting the way you currently login. It will simply mean you can also use AAF authentication in addition to your other login methods.
You must be logged in for this to work
Go to your account preference page and it should look like this:
In this case Homer has connected his GitHub account, but not his AAF. Simply push on the “Connect” button next to AAF:
This will take you to the AAF login window. Select the institution to which you belong and the authentication process will proceed. It may ask for your username and password, or if you are already logged in through AAF to another service it may not.
Now your user preferences page will look something like this, with the Associated Accounts now showing AAF as authenticated, and the email associated with the account.
How do I add AAF if I don’t already have an account
If you don’t already have an account follow the instructions for registering and choose AAF as your registration option:
What if I change my institution?
If you change institution you will not be able to log in using AAF connected to your old institution.
You can add other authentication methods like GitHub once you have an active account. It can be a good idea to have alternate login methods as you can then access your account in this way, disconnect your old AAF authentication and update to your new institution if that is affiliated with AAF.
If you do lose access to your account please email access.nri@anu.edu.au
Support
If you have any difficulties follow these instructions