noticeboard.ru.ac.za

All existing student accounts on the University's ICT systems will expire at the end of Friday 6th February 2009. At this time, any students who are not registered for the 2009 academic year will no longer be able to access their accounts.

Students who are returning and re-register on or before Friday 6th February 2009 will not be affected by this. Students who are returning and re-register after the 6th will not have access from the 7th until about 12 hours after they register. (Note that this means that most returning students will not have access to read their e-mail between the 7th and the 11th of February.)

Students who are not returning in 2009 are encouraged to ensure that they've cleaned up both their e-mail inbox and their home directories on jackal before this date. They may also wish to set up an e-mail forward to forward e-mail from their @campus account to a new address. Such forwards may work for a month or so after accounts expire, but cannot be configured or changed once expiry happens. Once accounts expire we will not be in a position to help students who've forgotten something they still need.

Postgraduate students who intend to submit in time for the April 2009 graduation, but do not intend registering for 2009, can have their access temporarily extended. Doing so requires permission, in writing, from the Registrar. The onus is on postgraduate students to organise such permission themselves on an individual basis.

Note that the date for this is known well in advance. It is always the Friday immediately before first year registration begins. This means that in 2010, it'll occur on Friday 29 January 2010 (the first teaching day in 2010 is 8 February).

Student Networking registrations for 2008 expire at the end of the 6th as well. During the course of the 7th, students who're making use of the Student Network and haven't yet registered for 2009 will be prompted to do so.

Several students are reporting seeing an ERR_NOVALIDDNS error. This error is as a result of their PC not realising that the 2008 Student Networking registration has expired. The simplest solution is to follow the instructions in the error message, viz "You should try rebooting your computer to make sure it's using the most recent network settings." This will work for most people. You may have better results turning your computer off, waiting a few minutes and then turning it back on.

If for some reason this doesn't work, do the following:

• close your web browser
• go to the Start menu and click on Run
• in the Open: text box, type cmd and click OK
• in the black command window that opens, type ipconfig /release
• then type ipconfig /renew
• and finally type exit to close the command window

then try and visit a web site again to start the process.

If you still don't get the sign up page, then your computer isn't correctly configured to use DHCP. Follow these instructions to set it to do so, or visit the Student Help Desk.