noticeboard.ru.ac.za

During the Tuesday, 23 April maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:

• DMARC policy update: DMARC is a framework for improving the authenticity of messages from an email domain. For a number of years, the DMARC policy for the @ru.ac.za has allowed us to monitor the extent of forging/spoofing of the @ru.ac.za domain.
  
  We're about to begin strengthening that policy to make it harder for forged messages to be delivered at all, because of the risk that forged messages could be used in phishing scams or other security attacks. On Tuesday evening, as a first step, we will publish a policy requiring that email systems quarantine 0% of non-DMARC compliant messages from @ru.ac.za addresses. That percentage will be gradually increased over the next few months, and eventually all non-DMARC compliant messages will be rejected.
  
  While we have done extensible monitoring to reduce the chance of this, it is still possible that legitimate email messages from RU senders might no longer be deliverable. If that should happen, you might find that email messages that you've sent from your RU address are returned (bounced) to you, or delivered into your recipients' spam folders.
  
  Particularly if that happens with contacts or mailing lists that you've have written to previously, please let I&TS Division know by contacting support@ru.ac.za. If you've received an undeliverable notification (bounce message) please be sure to include a copy of that.
• iPrint: software on the iPrint servers will be updated. We expect an outage of an hour affecting printing to all iPrint printers.
• Storage systems: software on storage systems will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected, though an unexpected failure during the upgrade would cause an outage affecting almost all services.
• Internet edge routers: the software on one of the two edge routers will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected as all network traffic should be handled by the other edge router.

This work is being conducted during a minor maintenance period. Should there be a compelling reason why this work should not go ahead as planned, please contact support@ru.ac.za before 3:00 PM on Tuesday.