From 4PM tomorrow (Thursday 13th July) afternoon networking to South side of the main administration building will be intermittently interrupted. As a result users in the following areas will be without networking:
Dean of Research's office, Communications and Development Division, Vice
Chancellor's office, Student Fees, the departments of Management, Accounts
and Economics, the Management, Math Stats and ABET labs, and parts of the
Finance Division.
Work will continue into the evening and users in these areas should expect to be without networking until the start of Friday morning. Users in these areas who still have problems connection on Friday morning should first try rebooting their computers, and then contact the IT Division help desk if the problem persists.
As usual, further information about this outage will be posted to http://noticeboard.ru.ac.za/
For those who're interested, the reason for this outage is that the switch stack serving main admin is going to be upgraded. Unfortunately, as the new switches are a different size to the old ones, this entails re-patching every network point that is connected to these switches. This is something that'll take a fair bit of time as it requires that new patch leads of the correct length be made up as each switch is installed.
This result of this upgrade will be increased network capacity to main admin as well as improved reliability of the switch stack.