noticeboard.ru.ac.za

On Tuesday 8th November the University's Internet access will be disrupted at about 5 PM. Normal connectivity should be restored within two hours.

During this time users will be unable to access any sites on the Internet. Connectivity to other machines within the University should be unaffected.

This interruption is necessary to allow Telkom to undertake planned maintenance on the fibre optic cable that connects the University to their Huntley Street exchange.

As usual, more information about this outage and any further updates will be posted to http://noticeboard.ru.ac.za/.

During this outage, Telkom will be relocating their fibre patch panel in Struben building from one 19" cabinet to another cabinet on the other side of the room. This entails cutting the fibre optic cable, re-routing it under our false floor, and then re-terminating the twelve fibre pairs that the cable contains.

Currently only one pair in this fibre optic bundle is in use -- it provides Rhodes with an 155Mbps ATM link to Telkom's Huntley Street exchange, which in turn links us into Telkom's IP backbone and TENET's network. We're not sure how Telkom plan to re-terminate their fibres, but it may involve fusion splicing new ends onto the fibres. Hopefully Telkom will be sensible about the order in which they chose to cut and then re-terminate the individual fibre optic strands. If this is the case, the two hours predicted downtime becomes a worst case senario.

This move will allow Telkom to reclaim the existing 19" cabinet that's currently housing their fibre patch panel (it is otherwise empty and belongs to them) as well as a second empty cabinet of theirs that's bolted to it. This in turn will free up some space in the computer room to house a new 19" cabinet of our own.