noticeboard.ru.ac.za

During the Tuesday, March 4th maintenance window, maintenance work affecting a number of services will occur, starting at 5:30 PM:

• P2000 access control: The current access control configuration will be written to flash on the network panels in the buildings below. It takes five to ten minutes for the process to complete, during which time cards cannot be read, doors remain locked and access control does not function. Buildings affected are:
  
  • African Media Matrix
  • Bantu Steve Biko (including Union lab)
  • Bangor House
  • Chemical & Pharmaceutical Sciences
  • Eden Grove (lab)
  • ELRC
  • Geography
  • Hamilton
  • Health Suite
  • Main Library (including 24 hour reading room)
  • New Arts (including Jacaranda lab)
  • New Education
  • Physics & Electronics (including Fountain & Guthrie labs)
  • Struben
  • Theatre
  If people find they cannot enter/exit a door that normally works for them, they should not panic -- simply try again ten minutes later. Access control administrators in each of theses buildings are strongly encouraged to put up notices to this effect on any affected doors that may see after-hours student traffic.
  
• VPN service: a major version upgrade will be performed on the router that provides VPN services, in an attempt to address some of the instability we have been experiencing. Whilst the upgrade itself should take no more than a few minutes, past experience with this software suggests that not all configuration changes may be documented and thus it may take some time to restore a working VPN service.
  
• Access switches: firmware updates will be done on a number of access switches, causing a brief network outage of approximately five minutes in the following buildings:
  • 29 South St
  • Schonland buildings (Botany)
  • Building maintenance
  • Education
  • English
  • DIFS
  • Furniture & equipment stores
  • Great hall
  • Grounds & Gardens HQ
  • Law (lab)
  • Law Clinic
  • Main Admin
  • Struben
• Virtual infrastructure: patches will be installed on all VMware servers, which will require a reboot of these hosts. This should not cause any interruptions for the virtual machines (and the services they provide) these servers host, but all these hosts will be at risk during the updates, and there may be outages if the updates go badly. This includes most central services (email, file & print, etc).
• Wi-Fi controller software updates: software on the Wi-Fi controllers controlling the access points which have been installed as part of the 2013/4 WiFi renewal project will be updated. Wi-Fi access will be unavailable for two outages of approximately five minutes at the points shown on this map.
• Software updates: software on a number of servers will be patched or upgraded. These upgrades will typically not be noticeable, but may result in a few seconds outage for affected services.

This maintenance work is being undertaken in the ITSC-approved scheduled maintenance window, and should be completed before midnight. More information about maintenance windows and maintenance periods.

Please note that the Wi-Fi controller maintenance has just been added to the post above.