One of the University's mail servers, elephant.ru.ac.za, will be taken down for maintenance at 16:00 on Wednesday 27 April (Freedom Day). This server hosts all of the University's mailboxes and as a result you'll be unable to access your @campus.ru.ac.za or @ru.ac.za e-mail during the maintenance period. It is expected that this should last no more than three hours. All outgoing (sent) e-mail is handled by a separate machine and should function normally. This means you'll be able to send e-mail but not read it.
For those who are interested, this downtime is to allow us to replace a failed hard disk in the mail server's RAID array and restore the array to its optimal state (it has already rebuilt the array and is currently running without a hot spare). The failed drive is corrupt rather than damaged and so will be reinserted into the array as the replacement hot spare. Depening on whether the RAID controller can format this drive online or not, downtime could be anywhere from ten minutes to three hours. We will attempt to keep it to a minimum by bringing the machine back up as soon as the controller is a state to continue operations online.