The ResNet help desk will be closed on Tues 19th December. Apologies for any inconvenience.

We will be open:

Wednesday 20th December 2pm – 5pm
Thursday 21st December 2pm – 5pm

and then closed Fri 22nd December – Tues 2nd Jan inclusive when the rest of the University is also closed.
After that we will be open weekdays from Weds 3rd Jan 2pm – 5pm.

Please visit in person to pay, or phone 89001 internal or 0117 928 9001 for technical support. For less urgent enquiries please email resnet-help@bristol.ac.uk and we will respond on our return.

From Monday December 18th to Sunday January 7th we are increasing the fair usage allowance from 10GB a week to 40GB a week. This means you can use up to 40GB offsite bandwidth per week. From Monday January 8th the usual 10GB a week limit will return.

We are able to do this as most people are not in residence over the vacation so demand on ResNet is much lower than normal.

If you track your usage with Manage My ResNet it will show your correct usage in GB, but may have the wrong figures for your usage as a percentage of your allocation.

As we said before, due to the recent problems we’ve had with our script we won’t be enforcing the penalties for excessive usage for the next three weeks – so if you exceed the 40GB allocation in this period you won’t be placed in the special network segment for heavy users *in this period*. However if your usage is higher than 40GB in this period you might be placed in the heavy users network from Monday 8th January onwards.
In short please use less than 40GB a week between Monday December 18th to Sunday January 7th. Very very few people use this much bandwidth in any case.

If you are going home for the Christmas vacation you can still access your email and other computing facilities, from anywhere with an Internet connection.

For email, use webmail or Mulberry both of which are available within and outside the University. For other services, such as electronic library resources, see remote access to University resources or read the remote access leaflet (printed copies available in libraries and at help desks).

If you won’t be reading your email you might want to set up a vacation message to let people know this. Please see using SmartSieve to set up or change a vacation message.

If you are staying in your room in University accommodation over the vacation you can carry on using the ResNet connection in your room. You can use Manage My ResNet to transfer your connection to another room, connect a new computer, or other common tasks.

The ResNet help desk will be open over the vacation but with reduced opening hours (details to follow). It will be closed completely for the period between Christmas and New Year, when the rest of the University is also closed.

Windows Vista, the replacement for Windows XP, will soon be available from Microsoft.

If you are considering upgrading your existing computer on ResNet to Vista – please don’t yet. Although we’ve already looked at beta copies, we need to do more work to make sure Vista works OK on ResNet. In particular, we don’t yet have a version of our McAfee VirusScan software that runs on Vista (and without McAfee we won’t let computers on ResNet, so if you upgrade now you won’t be able to connect).

From around February, new computers will be supplied with Vista. By that time we hope to have a version of McAfee available. There may be other software in use within the University that is still being tested even then.