QUOTE(Electrical Services @ Dec 24 2008, 9:55 AM)
Please note that the entire upper campus will be without electricity on Monday 29th December 2008 from 08h00 to 15h00 to enable necessary maintenance to be carried out on high voltage equipment and switchgear. The area affected is from Jamaat Khana and New House in the western sector to Somerset Street in the eastern sector.In other words the entire Smuts,Drostyd,Founders Hall and residences together with Baratt,Chemistry,Biosciences and related buildings will be without electricity during the abovementioned period. Please note that all circuitry must be treated as "live" during the outage as power may be restored at any time.
QUOTE(Electrical Services @ Dec 24 2008, 9:59 AM)
Please note that the entire lower campus will be without electricity on Tuesday 30th December 2008 from 08h00 to 15h00 to enable necessary maintenance to be carried out on high voltage equipment and switchgear. The area affected is from Rhodes Avenue in the western sector to Somerset Street in the eastern sector.In other words the entire St Mary's,Oriel,Allen Web Hall and residences together with Central Administration and all Admin sections and related buildings will be without electricity during the abovementioned period. Please note that all circuitry must be treated as "live" during the outage as power may be restored at any time.
This maintenance work will affect networking and Internet access in the aforementioned areas. Whilst the scope of the outage isn't entirely clear from the above, it is possible that this will affect the Estates switching centre, which will in turn affect network access in Adamson Annexe, PSAM, Sports Admin, HKE, Ground & Gardens, and Building Maintenance (even if those areas have electricity). In the same way, the Albany Museum, the Greens and Celeste House will be affected by the electrical outage in the Main Admin building even if they have power themselves.
Some telephony services may be affected. Whilst most of the PBXs have stand-by battery capacity for approximately eight hours, all IP telephones in the affected areas will not work for the duration of the outages. Since one of the electrical outages includes the Main Admin building, this could interrupt some of the University's incoming/outgoing phone lines. Anyone trying to contact a telephone system that has no power will hear an out-of-service tone.
Our Struben & AMM data centres have stand-by generators and sufficient diesel to ensure that it should be unaffected by this outage. This means that core IT services such as the Rhodes web sites and e-mail access from off-campus should be unaffected.
The network in most areas of campus will automatically recover once power is restored. Users may need to wait a few minutes after power is restored and then reboot their computer(s) in order to reconnect to the network. It is likely, however, that some areas of campus will not recover and will need human intervention to restore service. We're not able to predict where these areas may be (they're faults).
Unfortunately, as the Information Technology Division is closed for the end-of-year shutdown at the time of this work, and given the late notice, any faults that occur as a result of this power outage will only be attended to during the course of 5 January 2009. This may result in some of the aforementioned areas being without network access for a prolonged period of time. (This is particularly likely to affect wardens in residences.) Please see our after hours support page for more details.
Users still experiencing problems as a result of this after 5 January 2009 should contact support@ru.ac.za for assistance.