noticeboard.ru.ac.za

As is customary at this time of year, we've made some adjustments to the Internet quota system to allow staff and postgraduate students who remain in Grahamstown to make better use of the Internet bandwidth that is available over the December vacation. This year, however, we've done things slightly differently.

The following applies the period Sunday 28 November 2010 until Friday 4 February 2011 (inclusive):

per-user Internet quotas

For the duration of the vacation, all computers except those in public or departmental laboratories will be exempt from the per-user Internet quota (they'll still be subject to per-host quotas — see below). Unless you're accessing the Internet from a public lab, your browser should not prompt you to enter a username and password. Please note that you will have to close your web browser and re-start it in order to take advantage of this change.

If you install or make changes to software that uses the proxy servers during the period when authentication is disabled, be aware that you will need to make sure it is correctly configured once the authentication requirement is re-enabled — if you fail to do this, it is likely that you'll see the ERR_UNAUTHREQ proxy error message soon afterwards. For technical reasons, software that is configured in this way (i.e. any software that knows your login credentials) may still count towards your per-user Internet quota, but any per-user quota restrictions that come as a result of using such software will not be enforced. This means you may still get e-mail notifying you about use of your per-user Internet quota, etc.

It is possible that we may be forced to re-introduce per-user quotas for operational reasons. Should this happen you'll become aware that we've done so when your browser starts prompting you to enter a username and password; please assume that if your browser is doing this, you're subject to normal per-user quotas. We'll post confirmation to this noticeboard if and when this happens. You are encouraged to check here for up-to-date information rather than making assumptions.

per-host Internet quotas

Note that per-host quotas still apply as they have previously. For the duration of the vacation, however, we're making the following changes to the demand-side management system's scaling factors:

• Monday–Friday
  
  • 00:00–00:59 — scale factor of 0.1
  • 01:00–07:59 — scale factor of 0.02
  • 08:00–16:59 — scale factor of 0.5
  • 17:00–23:59 — scale factor of 0.1
• Weekends
  
  • 00:00–00:59 — scale factor of 0.1
  • 01:00–07:59 — scale factor of 0.02
  • 08:00–23:59 — scale factor of 0.1

During the University's annual shutdown (from 17:00 on Friday 17 December 2010 until 07:59 on Monday 3 January 2011), a scale factor of 0.01 will apply at all times of the day.

We expect that the above values will remain in force for the duration of the vac without further change. However, as has happened in the past, it is possible that during the course of the vacation we may make further adjustments (either up or down) depending on the absolute demand on the University's Internet bandwidth. Any adjustments that reduce the Internet quota available to users will be posted to this noticeboard topic in advanced. Again, you are encouraged to check here for up-to-date information rather than making assumptions.

Please be aware that we take the above adjustments into consideration when evaluating applications for quota credits at this time of year.

We've decided to extend our experiments with per-user quotas for a couple more weeks. As a result, only per-host quotas apply at the moment (except in public labs).

All other things quota-related have returned to their normal term-time defaults.