noticeboard.ru.ac.za

As of about 17:20 this evening Rhodes has had no Internet connectivity. The problem appears to be related to the ATM circuit that connects Grahamstown to Port Elizabeth and has been reported to Telkom. Thus far Telkom have unable to indicate a time-to-resolution.

This outage will affect all applications that depend on the Internet including, but not limited to, browsing the web, sending and receiving e-mail from external sites, instant messenger clients, etc. All e-mail sent during the outage will be queued and delivered once connectivity is restored.

That's probably because they're all enjoying a quiet weekend instead of being out there earning the R230 per hour we pay them on a 24/365 basis to provide us with a bit of bandwidth. My somewhat bitter experiences with Telkom involve remorseless hounding, shouting, harsh words, escalating and indiscriminate hysterical throwing toys out of cots in order to get them to understand you're not imagining a problem and to get them to actually do something about fixing it after hours. Their old helpdesk chestnut about "microwave misalignment" (carefully crafted in order to try and shut you up) lives on in new forms, and is just as tired and meaningless.

My bet is that it's the usual problem - somebody made configuration changes to one of their devices, didn't save them, rebooted the thing, then went home. There's no faults flashing on any Telkom consoles: ergo you're imagining things.

The line came up shortly after 6AM this morning. Telkom tell me that the cause of the outage was a damaged section of fibre optic caused by an accident in Uitenhage.