One of the computers (novell-cron) involved in the provision of user accounts for new student users suffered a hard disk crash during the course of yesterday. As a result, no new Novell user accounts were created after the 31st of January. This will have meant that whilst new users had access to their e-mail and Internet via our proxy servers, they won't have been able to make use of the public computer labs or the home space provided on jackal.ru.ac.za.
The affected machine has been replaced and hopefully our systems will catch up with outstanding registration requests during the course of this evening.
Students with existing accounts should have been unaffected by this as their accounts will have been automatically re-enabled by processes running on a different machine.