One of the University's core web servers, lizard.ru.ac.za, will be rebooted at 15.30 this afternoon in order to upgrade its operating system to FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE-p4. This web server hosts, amongst other things, the University's main web page at http://www.ru.ac.za/. It is anticipated that the server will be down for approximately ten minutes.
During this time, the University's web page will not be visible. This will have some implications on other services. In particular, users who restart their web browsers during the down time will find that they're unable to fetch the proxy autoconfiguration file. In most instances, browsers will revert to the last good copy they saved but in some cases users may be unable to browse the web. The solution is to wait for the server to become available again and to then close down and restart your web browser.
Departments who still host web sites on http://www.ru.ac.za/ (rather than http://campus.ru.ac.za/) will also not be able to update them during this downtime. The content management system (http://campus.ru.ac.za/) will remain visible and unaffected by this.
Two other machines, terrapin.ru.ac.za and hedgehog.ru.ac.za, will be rebooted at about the same time for similar reasons. These two machines don't provide any services to users that aren't redundant and served by other machines. For this reason, the effects of this part of the upgrade should be invisible to majority of users. The only exception to this is users of the experimental IPv6 network -- hedgehog provides IPv6 routing to the real world and, as a result, IPv6 connectivity will be affected by this upgrade.