noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At around 4.30AM this morning, the University lost access to the Internet for reasons unknown. Users will likely experience this as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites hosted off campus.

The cause of the outage is currently not known, but is a fault somewhere on our upstream service provider's network. TENET's service desk are aware of the fault, and are currently investigating.

This outage appears to be unrelated to the scheduled emergency maintenance that is supposed to occur tomorrow morning.

It appears that Eskom have brought forward the electrical work on the Grassridge substation that was going to result in the scheduled emergency maintenance tomorrow morning. Neither Infraco, Neotel, TENET, nor ourselves were timeously informed of this change -- Neotel apparently only became aware of the change late yesterday afternoon, and had no formal commitment.

The original change request asked for a six hour outage between 8AM and 2PM. The revised work scheduled apparently had Eskom starting work at midnight and completing by 7AM. As things actually happened, the outage commenced at 3.30AM. As such, they're now approaching the limit of their six hour maintenance window. Neotel is trying to establish the current state of the work.

This outage means that the announced outage between 8AM and 2PM tomorow has been cancelled.

It appears that service has just been restored. It is unclear whether this is just a temporary state of affairs, or whether work has now been completed.

About ten minutes ago (~ 12:30PM) we lost access to the Internet for a second time. It is unclear at the moment whether this is related to Eskom's earlier work. We're in the process of reporting the fault to TENET's service desk.

Earlier this afternoon, Neotel confirmed that the current outage was a complication of Eskom's work at Grassridge. Apparently both Neotel and Eskom engineers are on site and are working on the problem. Neotel estimate that service will be restored no later than 7PM this evening.