TENET has informed us that they'll be undertaking urgent scheduled maintenance of our Internet connection. This is provisionally scheduled for the early hours of Friday morning starting at approximately midnight and finishing by 6AM. During this outage there will be no Internet connectivity whatsoever. Users will not be able to browse the web, and any e-mails sent during the outage will be queued for later delivery.
For those who're interested, technical details of what work will be done follows:
The problem that TENET are trying to solve is the ongoing high CPU utilization on their international router. A couple of weeks ago we noticed that we were getting poor performance from TENET's interception cache and Rhodes asked to be (temporarily) excluded from the cache. TENET obliged and we saw a noticeable performance improvement. We now know that the reason for the perceived poor performance wasn't the cache itself, but the slow redirects from TENET's international router caused by the high CPU load (averaging over 95% load for the last couple of weeks).
In an effort to fix the problem, TENET have negotiated with Telkom to be allowed to temporarily take over some of the services provided by Telkom's router. There solution involves redirecting some of the traffic that'd normally pass through the (Telkom supplied) international router to another router owned by TENET. TENET's router is newer, and significantly more powerful, than Telkom's and should have no trouble handling the load. Unfortunately configuring the redirection involves re-implementing a significant part of the core of the GEN2 network, which will take some time.