During the Tuesday, 7 December maintenance window, maintenance work affecting a number of services will occur, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
IMAP discontinuation: as part of the process of discontinuing IMAP mailboxes which have been migrated to Gmail, the following will occur. Should these changes affect your access to email, please contact support@ru.ac.za (046 603 8288) for advice on alternatives.
The webmail service at https://webmail.ru.ac.za/ will be shut down.
All IMAP mailboxes will be set to read only. Existing messages in mailboxes will still be accessible, but it will not be possible to move messages into IMAP mailboxes.
Access switches: software will be updated on the network switches in the buildings listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) may be disrupted in those buildings for up to 30 minutes.
19 Somerset St
4 Gilbert St
5 Rhodes Ave
Adamson House
Allan Gray House
Allen Flats
Amina Cachalia House
Atherstone House
Beethoven House workshops
Beit House
Botany (front Schonland Building section only)
Campus Protection Unit HQ
Canterbury Annexe
Celeste House
Charlotte Maxeke House
Chris Hani House
Confucius Centre
Continuing Education Centre
Cullen Bowles House
De Beers House
Drostdy Lodge
Ellen Kuzwayo House
Enoch Sontonga House
Fine Art Photography
Goldfields House
Guy Butler House
Helen Joseph House and Annexe
Highway Africa Building
Hilltop 7, 8 and 9 Houses
Hilltop Hall admin block
ILAM
Joe Slovo House
Library (certain L3/L4 areas only)
Lincoln House
Livingstone House
Margaret Smith House
New House
Oakdene House
Olive Schreiner House
Oriel House and Annexe
Prince Alfred House
Robert Sobukwe House
Royal Engineers Building
Ruth First House
Sisulu House
Stanley Kidd House and Annexe
Stockenstrom Place
Thomas Pringle House
Victoria Mxenge House
Walker House
Server software updates: software on the servers which provide the following services will be updated, resulting in outages of up to 15 minutes per server.
DNS
DHCP
NTP
RT
Web proxies
Registration system
Incoming e-mail
Outgoing e-mail
IMAP e-mail mailboxes
Webmail
Mailing lists
SMS
Provisioning (web proxy autodiscovery)
Wi-Fi and VPN authentication
CHERTL Evaluation Assistant
Network graphs
Network monitoring
Terminal Four content management system
RU Single Sign-On system
Main web server (www.ru.ac.za, etc)
University administration and meal booking systems
SEALS Library consortium services
Network printing services (iPrint/PaperCut)
File servers/home directories (gnu, serval)
While we try to publish a list of all service-affecting work here in advance, the list should not be considered exhaustive and other low impact work may also be undertaken during the maintenance window.
This maintenance work is being undertaken in the ITSC-approved scheduled maintenance window.