What happens when I leave DoC?
The procedure varies from year to year, but the following notes give an idea of what to expect. Remember that swipe access to College premises is cancelled very promptly indeed.
If you are returning on another course of study in DoC, please let us know well before leaving, including confirmation from an appropriate member of staff (e.g. course director for an MSc course, or academic supervisor for a PhD).
Student accounts are normally closed one month after your course finishes. Staff, PhD and RA accounts are a matter for negotiation, discuss the matter with your line manager or supervisor first, and then discuss your needs with us in advance. CSG usually receive notice of departing RAs in particular, and so we may well contact you for information.
When your DoC account is closed, your VPN access will be terminated and your login credentials cancelled more or less immediately. Please make sure that you copy any files you wish to keep -- if you have a lot of data, please ask CSG and we may be able to arrange for it to be copied to DVD for you. We will give at least one week's notice by email before closure. If you have already set up mail forwarding to an offsite email address via your .forward file or by telling us, when we archive your account we will attempt to detect where you forward to and keep forwarding (as a favour) DoC email to that offsite address for "as long as possible". Note that if this causes a problem - e.g. if we start getting lots of bounced mail, or we find we can't send email to that offsite address, forwarding will be turned off immediately.
We also offer an alumni email forwarding for life service to all our graduates; you should be able to set this up yourself before leaving DoC. If you've set this up, we (again as a favour) attempt to forward email to you@doc to you@alumni.doc and thence offsite to you.
When we close accounts we remove temporary and junk files and then tar and compress the home directory, transferring the resulting file to DVD. It would help us save space if you could clear out any unwanted files before you leave. If you want a copy of the whole thing we can put the .tgz file up in a web location for you to download after we have closed the account, or of course you can burn an ISO image of your home dir to CD/DVD yourself before leaving.
This information refers to Department of Computing accounts only. Any queries about facilities provided by ICT should be referred to the ICT Service Desk. In practice, ICT will generally freeze accounts at the same time as CSG do for DoC accounts, but shortly after your course or contract of employment finishes for non-DoC students and staff. ICT also offer a College-wide alumni email service.
