During the Tuesday, 25 March maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
Wireless links: software on point-to-point wireless link devices will be updated. This will cause internet outages of up to 20 minutes in the following buildings:
Mandalay-off-High
One on Luke, Three on Luke
VPN service: software on the router which provides VPN services will be updated. An outage of ten minutes is expected.
WINS service: WINS is no longer recommended by Microsoft and we will discontinue the campus WINS servers. As a first step, the WINS servers will continue to operate, but from Tuesday evening they will no longer be advertised in DHCP responses. No disruption is expected, except for this particular set of circumstances:
Windows file sharing is in use, with a mapped drive letter or a path such as \\server\share;
The file sharing server was specified by its unqualified name (e.g. \\server\share), rather than by its fully qualified DNS name (\\server.subdomain.ru.ac.za\share) or IP address (e.g. \\146.231.1.2\share); and
That file sharing server's DNS name is not directly within .ru.ac.za or, alternatively, the client has been manually configured to use a different DNS suffix.
The recommended solution is to that particular issue is to specify the server by its fully qualified DNS name. If you have difficulty accessing Windows file sharing from Wednesday onwards, please contact support@ru.ac.za for assistance.
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.