During the Tuesday, November 6th maintenance window, the firewalls which connect the university to the Internet will be replaced, starting at 5:30 PM. The process of switching from the old firewalls to the new firewalls will cause a short outage during which the Internet will be completely inaccessible from all of campus.
However, once the new firewalls are running, it is likely that at least some Internet services/applications will not work immediately. This is because the new firewalls are of a completely different technology to those which they're replacing, and while we've configured and tested them in isolation, we cannot fully predict what'll happen with real network traffic. As soon as they're deployed, we will update this noticeboard post to confirm that they're running, and begin a process of monitoring the firewalls, testing applications, and making configuration changes as necessary to ensure that applications continue to work.
Should you notice that an Internet-based service/application which used to work, but once we've announced that the new firewalls are running, no longer works, please report the problem to support@ru.ac.za -- especially if the application in question is not widely used. Please include details about the service/application, the client software involved, and how you're using it as possible, as we may need to try to reproduce the problem ourselves in order to fix it.
This maintenance work is being undertaken in the ITSC-approved scheduled maintenance window.