Hello all,

It's time for the CompSoc network, in its present form, to be wound down. This is largely because of the absence of a committee and of student sysadmins - the society has effectively ceased to exist. This has made Worcester College reluctant to continue hosting salami, and the recent takeover of CI-Net by MDNX means their hosting of stanley will no longer be possible after they move offices at the end of the year.

Our aim is therefore to shut down stanley by 28 November and salami by the end of the year. For the immediate future, Dominic Hargreaves has kindly provisioned a virtual machine which we will use to enable an orderly migration of remaining users away from CompSoc services; please read on for the actions that you need to take.

All services currently provided by the network will be switched off on 28 November. The only exceptions are the following:

* E-mail forwarding for @ox.compsoc.net addresses. We will use the virtual machine to continue forwarding mail for active addresses to a destination of your choice. Note however that we will *not* be providing local mail storage or IMAP, so those of you currently keeping mail on CompSoc machines need to make alternative arrangements. Please note also that we will be taking this opportunity to drop support for e-mail sent directly to machine names under .ox.compsoc.net, and also scrapping the aliasing of ox.compsoc.org.uk to ox.compsoc.net - we do not believe any of these facilities to be under active use.

* The society website at http://www.ox.compsoc.net will be moved to the new machine. URL redirection from http://www.ox.comspoc.net/~username and similar URLs will continue to work. Users who currently host files under www.ox.compsoc.net/~username and similar will need to find alternative homes for those files, though we will add HTTP redirects on request to ensure the URLs continue to work.

Please note that shell accounts will *not* be provided on the new machine. Current shell users are welcome to have their e-mail addresses and web URLs forwarded/redirected (see above), but should take steps to retrieve any data they currently have on CompSoc machines before 28 November. This includes:
** /var/mail/<user>
** the contents of your home directory
** any MySQL databases you have on stanley

If you have no further use for any such data, *please take the time to delete it* in order to minimize the time/liability burden on us. We have not made a firm decision yet on how long we will archive user data for, but it is unlikely to be for the long term.

We will also be archiving material relevant to a new committee, should one be formed (the membership database and committee SVN repositories) on the new machine, in order to enable an easy re-start of the society if sufficient student enthusiasm and time can be found in future.

Please reply to this e-mail as soon as possible to let us know:
* Whether your @ox.compsoc.net e-mail address should continue to work, and to where it should forward if so
* Whether your web space at http://www.ox.comspcoc.net/~you should forward requests to a new URL, and if so, what it should be

If we do not receive a response to this e-mail before 28 November, or we receive a bounce, we will suspend your account and archive the data to give you a chance to respond at a later date.

If you are looking for a new provider of web/mail/shell accounts, one possibility used by a number of CompSoc people is Mythic Beasts (http://www.mythic-beasts.com/).

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Regards,
David North
(on behalf of the SysAdmin team)