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Accounts at the ZAH and the University of Heidelberg

If you work at the ZAH or collaborate with us from external institutions, you might need to have access to our internal compute resources. For this purpose, the ARI and the ITA maintain a central user account database that allow you to access those systems. Due to technical limitations, this account is different from the central Uni-ID you get if you are a formal member of the University of Heidelberg (as a student, employee, guest lecturer or similar).

The ZAH account is used to access internal systems at the ZAH like the desktop workstations at ARI and ITA, the gateway SSH system or the compute nodes.
The Uni-ID is used to access everything offered by the URZ, e.g. Eduroam, the E-Mail-System, collaboration tools like Heibox, HeiConf, HeiCHAT and Moodle and also university and statewide cluster systems

How to get these accounts?

ZAH-Account: You should get a mail at your first day that contains a link to a form where you can supply the password and an SSH key. If you don't receive such a mail, please contact your supervisor and ask him to make sure that you have been entered in our personnel database (Infothek) and your mail address is correct. If that is the case and you still haven't received the key, please contact the ZAH IT-Service at admin(at)zah.uni-heidelberg.de.
Uni-ID: The Uni-ID is created automatically when you formally become a member of the University and you will receive a letter from the university computing centre (URZ) with the username and the initial password. This process is handled by the central administration of the University (ZUV) and the URZ and the IT staff at the ZAH is not involved in this at all. The best way to get help with your Uni-ID is to contact the URZ IT-Support at it-service(at)uni-heidelberg.de.

Account Expirations

ZAH-Account: After your time at the ZAH ends, your ARI/ITA account will be valid for an additional 30 days and will be fully functional. In some cases, we can extend your account beyond that if you have still ongoing projects at the ZAH. You have to discuss this with your supervisor and ask him to get you listed as an external collaborator in our Infothek database.
Uni-ID: If you have a student Uni-ID and stay enrolled at the university, the Uni-ID will continue to work. If you have an employee Uni-ID and leave the university, the account will work for 49 days after your contract ends, but some functionality might be disabled earlier. During this time, you can configure an Auto-Reply for your mail account stating that you have left the university where you might inform about a new address. Forwarding mails to an external address is offically not allowed per the university e-mail policy (german only link). This Auto-Reply will be active at least until the end of the calendar year following your exit from the university (e.g. if you leave at any point in 2023, it will be active until the end of 2024). Please see the URZ mail documentation to learn how to configure the Auto-Reply.