When your stay at Leiden Observatory or Lorentz Institute is at an end, it is time to think about what to do with the materials you have accumulated, both physically (cleaning out your office) and virtually (your files on disk).

The most convenient action is to make your own backup of the data you want to keep and clean up afterwards. We keep accounts open for six months after departure to allow you to first deal with moving and settling in, and then copying files over the network. Alternatively, you can of course make backups (e.g. on a removable disk).

If (parts of) the data will be used by others, e.g. your supervisor, coworkers or students, you (or the supervisor) should let this be known to the computer group. We can assist in changing ownership, or moving the data to another computer; your old desktop pc will probably need to be cleaned out in order to be made available to another student or guest, so don't assume the data will stay in the same place forever.

Your account stays valid for one half year after you leave. If access to the computers is needed beyond this period, a local staff member should 'sponsor' your affiliation as a 'remote guest' of the observatory. This is not done automatically! An extension of the account is given for one year. If continued access is required the prolonging procedure above can be repeated 'indefinitely'. A 'remote guest' status comes with an end date. Once this date has been reached, you will get an e-mail that your account has been closed (see e-mail forwarding below, it's not our responsibility if you don't see this e-mail). of course your sponsoring staff member can ask for an extension of this period.

It is of course your responsibility to keep your account safe. It is NEVER allowed to hand out your password to others and turn your account into some sort of group account. Even though you don't work here any more, use of the computers is still governed by the University policies that prohibit this.

To facilitate the setup of e-mail forwarding to your new address, we have some setup already in place in the template .procmailc that most users already have (if not, type 'SfinxUpdate .procmailrc' to install). Just open the file in a text editor, scroll down to the section about e-mail forwarding, uncomment the lines you want (remove the # signs) and fill in your new e-mail address. Please do NOT just put your new address in .forward . This was a fine mechanism in the days when spam was still a brand of canned meat, but nowadays such actions may make it look like our server is sending out spam, whereas it is actually just forwarding the spam you get on your old address (filtering is done by procmail, and is bypassed if you create a .forward file!) If your e-mail forwarding is landing our server on a spam blacklist, we will remove your forwarding (and let you know about it afterwards, if possible).