Students sometimes ask what will happen to their computing accounts when they have finished their course of study in DoC.

The procedure varies from year to year, but the following notes give an idea of what to expect. Remember that swipe-card access to college premises is cancelled fairly promptly.

If you are returning on another course of study in DoC (resources for other departments of the college are provided by ICT) please let us know well before leaving, including confirmation from an appropriate member of staff.

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 boss/supervisor first and then discuss your needs with us in advance.

PPP/VPN dialin services will be terminated at the same time. You should copy any files you wish to keep. 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 via 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 - eg. if we start getting lots of bounced mail, or we find we can't send email onto 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 CD. 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 the college computer centre (ICT) should be referred to their help desk (mail help@imperial.ac.uk). Generally, we believe they archive College accounts pretty quickly. Recently, ICT have started offering their own alumni email service, ask them for details of what that does and how to use it.

CSG / May 2008