TENET, our upstream Internet service provider, have advised us that Telkom will be undertaking planned maintenance work on our Internet circuit on Sunday 21 August 2005 between midnight and 6 AM.

This maintenance work will result in Rhodes, as well as all other South African tertiary education institutions, being without access to the Internet. This means that users at Rhodes will be unable to browse the web, access sites outside the University, etc. E-mail sent or received during the outage will be queued for later deliver.

You are strongly advised to plan around this outage.

For those who are interested, more technical details follow ...

Telkom will be performing changes to the GEN2 Gateway facility in Bellville over this weekend with the result that TENET will experience a total network outage. The work is required to alleviate increasing pressure on the CPUs of the GEN2 Gateway routers.

Sites that connect to Rhodes via the Grahamstown Internet Exchange should be unaffected by this outage.