Students who are returning and re-register on or before Sunday 16th February 2014 will not be affected by this. Students who are returning and re-register late will re-gain access to their account within about 12 hours of registering (and usually much quicker than this).
Leavers
Students who're leaving the University and are not returning in 2014 are strongly encouraged to ensure that they've cleaned up both their e-mail inbox and their home directories on jackal before this date. Please be aware that once accounts expire we will not be able to help students who've forgotten e-mail or a document they still need, so make sure you have copies of everything you might need!. If you've already left Rhodes you can access your home directory using the file manager client that is built into webmail, provided your account has not yet expired.
Leavers should consider setting a vacation message informing people of their new e-mail address and/or configuring an e-mail forward on their @campus e-mail address. Both these things can be done by logging into webmail (https://webmail.ru.ac.za/) and selecting the "Filters" option from the menu. Vacation messages and forwards will continue to work until the account is archived (this happens 92 days after it expires). Note, however, they cannot be configured or changed once accounts are expired.
Every year a handful of students wake up to this as they're trying to apply for jobs, etc and realise they've left something behind. Whilst we try, we usually cannot help them. So please, make sure you have copies of everything you might need! (we cannot stress this enough).
Mailing Lists
Subscriptions to University-run mailing lists remain after accounts expire for as long as the accounts still exist on our systems. This means that students who've left and who've forwarded their mail to another address will continue to receive mail sent to mailing lists until such time as they're manually unsubscribed by the list owner(s), or until their accounts are archived (92 days after they expire). As a result, every year we get a few people complaining that they're receiving mail that's no longer relevant to them -- if this is true in your case, you should either remove the mail forward from your account, unsubscribe yourself from the relevant list(s), or filter the mail. Alternatively contact the owner(s) of the individual list(s) in question (not the IT Division) and ask them to help you unsubscribe.
Per-course mailing lists get reset on early in the year (before registration opens), and only include students who have enrolled in the current years' courses. The same is true of residence mailing lists.
Student Network
All registrations on the student network will expire at the end of Friday 7th February 2014, immediately before first year registration. If you're using the student network after this date, you'll need to register as a 2014 student before trying to sign up. Be aware, however, that support for the student network is only available during term times -- see http://www.ru.ac.za/studnet/support for more details.
Students in residences that did not appoint a Student Networking house rep by the end of 2013 will not be able to sign up for or use the network in their residence until such time as an appointment is made.
Postgraduate registrations in academic departments are tied to student registration -- if a student does not return, any registrations will be removed when their account expires. Students who move departments will be offered the opportunity to de-register their PC when they re-register it in their new department. All registrations in departments expire on the anniversary of their first registration.
Printing credit
All printing credit rolls over into the new year. This means if you had printing credit on your account at the end of 2013, the same credit will be there when you re-register in 2014.
Students who are leaving at the end of 2013 should ensure that they exhaust their printing credit before leaving. Information about this has been available on the ROSS printing credit purchase page for at least two months.
Postgrads who are writing up / working on papers
Postgraduate students who intend to submit in time for the April 2013 graduation, but do not intend registering for 2014, may be able to have their 2013 registration (and hence access) temporarily extended. Doing so requires explicit permission, in writing, from the Registrar. The onus is on postgraduate students to organise such permission themselves on an individual basis.
There are some caveats associated with these extensions. What the extensions do is that they re-enable your 2013 account. This means that anything that checks for an active registration in the current academic year (i.e. 2014) will not work. This is known to include the following:
- If you wait until your account has expired before doing this, you will likely encounter more problems than if you approach the Registrar timeously. This is because once your account expires, several automatic clean-up routines run and their actions cannot always be easily or automatically undone.
- You may not be able register on the student network (including the eduroam wireless network).
- You can register a PC from a wired network point in your department, but only if you were recorded as being a postgraduate student in 2013. This may affect people who completed four year undergraduate degrees in 2013.
- Your 2013 student card will not be re-enabled, and no access groups will be assigned to it.
- The above means that you will not be able to get into the Library or other areas that use student cards for access control. If you desperately need access to these facilities, you might be able to ask the administrator(s) of these facilities for a manual exception. Such exceptions cannot be guaranteed.
There is an explicit, hard expiry of all previous-year accounts on the first day of the second term. After this, we cannot guarantee any services will work, even in the unlikely event that the Registrar grants further extensions. This is because a number of housekeeping routines are scheduled to happen immediately after graduation.