noticeboard.ru.ac.za

2007/01/12 - Scheduled Power Outage
QUOTE(Electrical Manager @ Dec 13 2007, 12:58 PM)
Please note that the supply of electricity to the lower campus will be interrupted between 08hoo and 16h00 on Saturday 12th January 2008.

The areas affected will be from New house in the west to Somerset Street in the east and from Winchester House in the south to African Street in the north. All academic as well as residential buildings will be without electricity during the above period.

This power outage is necessary to undertake preventative maintenance at the main Substation RU1.

Please note that all electrical circuitry must be treated as live during the outage as the power could be restored at any time.


This power outage will have knock on effects on campus networking and telecommunications.
  • Our main data centre in Struben building will run on its standby generator for the duration of the outage. This means that those areas that do have power will continue to have access to core network services. In particular, external access to the University's mail and web servers should be unaffected.

  • The University's PBX infrastructure will run off battery power for so long as there's battery capacity. There are four PBX nodes affected by this outage: Main Admin, Struben building, and the Student Union building, Eden Grove.
    • Main Admin and Struben building provided telephony to the campus at large, and have between eight and ten hours of battery backup each. If they're affected, it'll be for a short while towards the end of the power outage. If this happens, it'll disrupt all telephony on campus (the vast majority of phones will cease to work). We'll attempt to procure standby generation for the Main Admin node.
    • Eden Grove and the Student Union serve local areas (St Peters campus, Eden Grove building [including the Registrar's division], Estates division, Great Hall, the Barratt complex and the Student Union building). These two PBX nodes are backup up by much smaller UPSes and will only stay operational for around half an hour after the power goes off. Once the battery supply to these two nodes is exhausted, telephones in the affected regions will be unreachable until such time as power is restored. People phoning telephones in these areas will get an out-of-service tone.
  • Once power is restored, networking in most of the effected areas will be restored automatically. Users may find that they have to wait for fifteen minutes or so after power has been restored and then reboot their computers before they will be able to connect to the network.

    Sometimes network switches do not recover gracefully from power outages. In these instances our network technicians will have to visit the affected areas before connectivity can be restored. This is only likely to happen during the course of the following Monday morning (i.e. Monday 14th, being the first working day thereafter). As a result it is possible that some areas of campus may be without networking for the entire weekend. All users should plan for this to be the case.

    Our monitoring systems will automatically detect the problematic areas, and so there's no need to let us know about them.
Users who have connectivity problems once power is restored should first wait fifteen minutes, reboot their computer and try again. If a reboot does not resolve the problem, they should try to ascertain whether their whole building is affected. If it is, the IT Division is probably already aware of the problem. If other people in their building are successfully connecting and the problem persists for an individual, they should contact the Help Desk on extension 8288 during the course of Monday morning.
QUOTE(Electrical Manager @ Jan 11 2008, 3:24 PM)
REMINDER! Please note that the supply of electricity to the lower campus will be interrupted between 08hoo and 16h00 on Saturday 12th January 2008.

Please remember that this is likely to caused prolonged network outages in some parts of the campus. If networking in a particular area doesn't recover within half an hour of power returning, it is likely that it'll only recover once our technicians visit the area during the course of Monday.
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