noticeboard.ru.ac.za

The free-space optics link that normally provides The Greens with connectivity appears to be faulty. The fault developed slowly over the course of last week, and finally ceased functioning late on Friday afternoon.

The Greens is currently connecting to Rhodes' network via an existing wireless backup link. This link has approximately 1/10th the capacity of the normal FSO circuit and is currently very congested. Users at The Greens will experience this as the network appearing to be "slow", irrespective of whether they're connecting to resources on campus or on the Internet. Traffic within The Greens itself should be unaffected.

We ask users at The Greens to be conservative about their network use -- please avoid downloading large files (it'll probably be quicker to walk to campus with a flash stick anyway) or using applications that generate large amounts of network traffic. If the link continues to remain congested, we may need to consider measures to shape individual traffic usage.

At the moment we do not have an estimated time-to-repair. In the worst case, if the FSO unit needs to be repaired or replaced, it could take several weeks or a couple months.

Unfortunately, it has not been possible to work on this problem as yet. Doing so would involve climbing a long ladder, which would not be safe in the rain.

Work on The Greens' FSO link has been complicated by a number of factors, including physical access to the equipment and availability of staff. We've been communicating these with The Greens' house rep, and will continue to do so.

In the interim, we've replaced the backup wireless link with one that has significantly more capacity. This became operational on Wednesday of last week.

We've managed to do some extensive testing of the FSO link to the Greens, and have come to the conclusion that the transmission circuit on the Greens side has failed. We're in contact with the manufacturer's representative in order to try and arrange for it to be repaired.