SAML on Beta after weekend update?

[John_Lowe]

Is anyone else having SAML authentication failure on their beta environment after the weekend beta update?  Prod and test still work great, but beta is just returning a blank page for us after a successful SAML auth.

[John_Lowe]

I received confirmation that Instructure made an ACS URL change to beta yesterday, May 16, impacting SAML -- the same change that they plan to perform in production on June 4.  Unfortunately, they do not plan to update the metadata with the InCommon Federation until May 27. Because of the beta change on May 16 without the InCommon metadata update scheduled for May 27, Canvas beta environments are unable to use SAML authentication in any institutions like ours who rely solely on the InCommon Federation for SAML metadata assertions during this time unless they reverse the beta change made yesterday or update InCommon before May 27.    At least we have an answer about why Beta isn't working.

[mcowen]

John,

If you have a secondary login (one that uses Canvas authentication) you can bypass the SAML login by going to <schoolname>.beta.instructure.com/login/canvas  Then use your secondary login to authenticate.  If you do not have a secondary login, you have a couple of options.

1) Find a Canvas admin that does, and ask them to set one up for you, too.

2) Contact your CSM and ask him/her to set one up for you.

3) As a last resort, contact Canvas support and ask them to set one up for you.

Hope this helps!

PS. The password recovery feature does not work on beta because communication features are turned off in beta & test sites.

[John_Lowe]

That's great for me as an admin (and I have that BTW), but doesn't help our faculty who are trying to use the Beta environment to become familiar with the new UI that we will be enabling on May 31.    We made postcards, email messages, etc. all publicizing the beta URL for faculty to see and experience the new UI before May 31.

[John_Lowe]

Instructure was able to resolve this situation today.  I do not know if they reversed the change in Beta or if they updated the InCommon metadata sooner than they originally planned, but we now have a Beta environment again that our faculty can authenticate into and use for exploring the new UI.  Thanks!

[fosterl]

We contacted our CSM last week, and were able to get Instructure to update our metadata at InCommon so that Beta logins would work again. We have some testing we're doing this week, and needed Beta available as we have developer keys created in Prod, and didn't want to have to wait until Test is refreshed in two more weeks. So if you really need Beta, ask your CSM if your metadata can be updated. They also leave the old SAML endpoints (as they will on May 27 when everyone is done), so your Production instance still works!