Two more of the core servers will be upgraded during the course of today and are scheduled to be rebooted at 16:00 this afternoon. The two affected machines are rhino and squirrel.
Rhino is the User Support server and runs http://software.ru.ac.za/, http://studsoft.ru.ac.za/, http://help.ru.ac.za/ as well as providing shared file services and anti-virus updates. During the final stages of this upgrade, these services will not be available.
Squirrel is the primary cache server and provides access to the Internet via the web. There are two backup cache servers and all traffic should be transparently redirected to these servers. Users who do not make use of the automatic proxy configurations script, or who use any of the Mozilla-based web browsers may have to restart their browsers to get them to pick up the configuration change.
Downtime on these two systems is expected to be in the region of ten to fifteen minutes if all goes according to plan. We experienced unexpected difficulties with one of the previous systems upgraded and while we don't anticipate the same problems this time around, it is worth noting that these services may go down for considerably longer than expected.
More details about these upgrades can be found in an earlier post.