During the Tuesday, 6 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:
Distribution routers: software will be updated on the routers serving all buildings in the areas listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) may be disrupted in those areas for up to 30 minutes.
Main campus: all buildings in the area within Prince Alfred St, Somerset St and Lucas Avenue, up to and including Biological Sciences Building, the Library and Psychology
St Peters campus: all buildings south of Lucas Avenue.
Hill campus: all buildings which are south of Prince Alfred St and west of New House (inclusive).
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, studentfiles)
PC login service for public labs
Core and Internet edge routers: the software on one of the two core routers and one of the Internet edge routers will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected as all network traffic should be handled by the other core router or the other edge router.
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.
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.