At 14:00 this afternoon, Makana Municpality informed us that they intend to disrupt the University's electricity supply this Sunday (31 July) between 06:00 and 14:00. This outage is intended to allow the municipality to undertake urgent maintenance.
All telecommunication services on campus will be affected by this outage. This includes, but is not limited to, Internet and e-mail access, the SEALS library service, analogue telephony (PABX) and local campus networking.
Since the UPS in Struben building is not capable of holding our systems up for that long, as a precautionary measure, the University's core servers, including the mail, DNS, cache and Novell servers will be automatically shut down at 05:30 on Sunday morning. If the municipality postpones the outage, or if power has not been cut by 08:00, we will begin restoring services shortly thereafter. This means that, at the very least, the University's network will be unusable between 05:30 and 08:30.
As is typical with power outages of this magnitude, the University's network will take some time to stabilise once power returns. Whilst we will endeavour to return normal service as soon as possible after power returns, it is likely that service on some parts of the campus will only be restored during the course of Monday.
Telephones connected to node two of the PABX (Eden Grove and St Peters Campus) will be provided with power for approximately four hours. After this time, phones in these areas will cease to function. Nodes one and two (which supply the remainder of campus) should remain operational for the entire duration of the outage (they have 12 hours of battery). Some features, such as the voicemail system, will be unavailable for the entire duration of the outage.