noticeboard.ru.ac.za

2022/02/01 - Scheduled maintenance, 1 February
 

During the Tuesday, 1 February 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, access to IMAP mailboxes will be restricted to PCs/devices on the campus network only. Should this change affect your access to email or you see error messages from your email client about being unable to connect to the IMAP server, please contact support@ru.ac.za (046 603 8288) for advice.

    As a temporary workaround, connect to the VPN service to access IMAP mailboxes. Please note that the IMAP service will be shut down entirely in future.

  • Telephones: software on the router which connects the PBX to our upstream provider will be updated. An outage of ten minutes is expected, during which time ongoing calls will be disconnected and it will not be possible to place or receive external calls.

  • Wireless links: software on point-to-point wireless link devices will be updated.  This will cause network outages (including IP telephones and Wi-Fi access) of up to 20 minutes in the following buildings:

    • 1 and 3 On Luke

    • Mandalay off High

  • Single Sign On service: the software which provides the single sign on service will be updated. There may be times when it will not be possible to login to services which use the single sign on service, such as RUconnected, ROSS or library electronic resources, among others, at times during the evening.

  • 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.

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