The main gateway/firewall that provides the residence network with connectivity will be rebooted at about 9am tomorrow morning. If all goes according to plan the gateway should be down for no longer than ten minutes.

This downtime will affect all ResNet users -- they'll be unable to access any computers outside their own residence for the duration of the downtime. Normal networking should be restored as soon as the gateway finishes booting.

The reason for this reboot is to install a new kernel on the machine in order to support device polling. This should hopefully reduce the load the machine is currently experiencing from interrupt-related context switches (as a result of passing almost 40MB/s of network traffic at peak times).

You should be aware that there will be further reboot, with slightly longer downtime, at a later stage. This will allow us to move the machine into a new case and replace the CPU fan. At the moment we're awaiting delivery of parts; we'll e-mail the ResNetTech-L and ResNetRepl-L lists (as well as posting here) when we have a definite date and time.