As part of our planned migration from a server-oriented infrastructure to a services-orientated infrastructure, we have recently made some changes to the way the University's Domain Name System (DNS) servers work.
This change should be transparent to the vast majority of users. The University's DHCP servers are currently serving the new DNS servers and so anyone whose machine obtains its IP address automatically will find that their computer picks up the new settings within a day or so. People who've manually configured their machines, however, will need to make the changes listed below.
Traditionally, Rhodes has served all its DNS off two servers, hippo and terrapin. These two machines offer both recursive name resolution (what happens when your computer tries to look up the address of another computer) for hosts inside the University as well as authorative name services for, amongst other things, nine African countries. Having a single name server serve both recursive and authorative requests is no longer considered good practice, so we've decided to split the two services onto seperate IP addresses.
The three new recursive name servers (i.e the ones you should use when you configure your machine's resolver) are 146.231.129.97, 146.231.129.98 and 146.231.129.102. You'll notice that these resolve as a.dns.ru.ac.za, b.dns.ru.ac.za, and f.dns.ru.ac.za respectively. Please note that this list may be altered or extended over time (we've made provision in our IP address allocations for up to sixteen DNS servers), and as such, it is the responsibility of anyone who choses to manually configure their machines to ensure that they keep their list of resolvers up-to-date.
Hippo and terrapin (146.231.128.1 and 146.231.128.6) will now serve exclusively as authorative name servers. At the moment they're still configured to serve in a dual role, but their use as recursive name servers is officially depricated. At some stage in the future they will be reconfigured to refuse recursive requests, meaning that anyone who's resolver is still using them at that stage will find that DNS simply stops working for them.