Technical Note - Account Expiration FAQ

Summary

ECS expires accounts with our systems once they are no longer deemed to be of use in your studies. This document details what happens when an account expires, and what to do if you think your account should still be useful.

Details

I received an email about my ECS account expiring. What should I do...

...as a student in 100-400 level courses

Students enrolled in these courses generally only have access to their accounts during the trimesters that their courses are taught.

However, you might receive an "account expires in seven days" email warning even though you believe that your enrollment entitles you to access to your account after the stated expiry date. In most cases, this will simply be because we haven't updated account expiry dates with the latest enrollment data. As the date that accounts are due to expire gets closer we do run the update process more frequently to ensure that all current enrollment data is taken into account. If you added an ECS course within the last month you probably won't have to do anything about the warning email. It's most likely that before your account expiry date is reached we will have updated expiration dates to take into account all recent enrollments.

If, on the other hand, you get the seven day expiry warning and any ECS course additions were made more than a month ago, or you get a warning that your account will expire in two days, it might be that our idea of what courses you are enrolled in differs from yours! You should email jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz describing your situation so we can sort out the confusion before your account expires.

...as a MSc or PhD thesis student

Thesis student account expirations are handled manually because the central student administration system doesn't provide us with enough information to automatically set expiry dates based on current enrollment. In any event thesis student accounts are often required when the student is not currently enrolled. So when you receive an email informing you of your account expiration you need to ask your supervisor to send an email to jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz to confirm that your account is still required and to provide a new account expiration date. We prefer not to extend accounts for more than a year at a time, so this process may have to be repeated several times during the course of your thesis.

...as a guest

Guest accounts are usually created because they are needed for some collaborative work between an external (non-ECS) person and an ECS staff member. Regardless of how long the collaboration is expected to last, guest accounts are usually set to have a life time of at most one year and can then be renewed for one year periods until they are no longer required. We do this to ensure we get a periodic indication as to whether or not the account is still required.

To get a guest account renewed all you have to do is ask your ECS collaborator to send an email to jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz requesting that this be done.

I received an email about an account 'role' expiring. What should I do?

Role expiration is largely the same issue as account expiration, except that instead of losing your account, you are losing some access privileges. This could happen because your enrollment in some (but not all) of our ECS courses is ending, or your staff contract with ECS has changed.

If you don't think a role should expire you should ask the ECS academic staff member responsible for you having that role (your thesis supervisor, the person you were working for as a research assistant, the course coordinator of the course you were tutoring, etc) to email jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz asking for the role to be extended.

I'll be an ECS student next year. Can I have access to my ECS account over summer?

Unless you are enrolled in a summer course, are working on a graduate project or are a thesis student, the answer will generally be no. The reason for this is that ECS technical staff use the summer break to do reconfiguration and maintainance work on our servers, networks and labs. This work would be much harder to complete with many users on our systems.

One exception is for students who are doing research assistant or course preparation work for an ECS staff member over the break. In this case, that staff member just needs to send an email to jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz to request that your account not be expired.

If you think you can make a good case for retaining access to your account over the summer break, feel free to email jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz describing your situation. Please note the following reasons are not sufficient:

• Wanting to continue with personal study over the break to get a head start for the next year unless there are special circumstances (which will generally have to be backed up by an ECS academic staff member).
• Not having access to a computer elsewhere. If you need access to a computer and don't have one at home you could use the SCS (Student Computing Suite) since SCS access does continue over the summer.

I'm not enrolled in ECS courses next trimester but will be in the one after. What happens to my account?

Your account is suspended until your enrollment recommences.

What happens to my files when my account expires or is suspended?

We don't remove your account (or your files) from our system as soon as your account has expired. In fact, we generally keep student accounts around for at least two full trimesters (including the summer trimester) after expiration. If you re-enroll in an ECS course any time before your account is removed, you will find all your files exactly as they were when you last had access to our system.

If you do not enroll in an ECS course for two full trimesters your account and files will be removed from our system. If you think you might want future access to your ECS files it is your responsibility to copy them from our system before your account expires.

For guest accounts, if your account expires we will not remove it from our system until we have confirmed with your collaborator that it and any files belonging to it are no longer needed.

One potential issue for accounts that have expired and are later renabled is that any personalisations or customisations will remain. However, personalised configurations for versions of software that were current when you last used your account may not work with newer versions that have been subsequently installed. If this is identified as a problem we may have to reset these configurations back to a working default.

What will happen to my email while my account is suspended?

As with your files, any email already received before your account expires will be untouched. If you have set up email forwarding mail will continue to be forwarded for around six months after account expiry. This is intended to allow continued use of your ECS email address for a reasonable period in case you do more ECS courses in the future.

However, local delivery of email will be blocked, mainly so you won't be faced with an accumulation of several months of email if your account is ever renabled. This also means our disk doesn't fill up with email that might never be read. Because local delivery is blocked, if you haven't set up a forwarding address, any email sent to your account will be bounced back to the sender with a "user suspended" error message. This is so that the sender won't think you have the ability to read their message.

If you don't want ECS email to be forwarded, you should cancel your forwarding before your account expires. If you forget to do this in time you can send an email to jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz asking us to do it for you.