Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:11:50 +0200
The Rhodes University network will be down from 17:00 on Friday, January 20th. All services on the network will be affected, including e-mail, Novell logins, the SEALS library server, and all Internet access. Telephones in AMM and Bangor House will also be inoperative.
We expect that the network will be up by 19:00, with the exception of Hamilton Building. Further work will be performed on Hamilton's network which is expected to be completed by 20:00.
During this downtime, the core switch-routers in the Struben and Hamilton Buildings will be upgraded. Power supplies, switching fabrics, port cards and operating software will be replaced. These upgrades will provide additional network capacity and will allow for a redundant network core to be set up.
We apologise for the inconvenience caused.
Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:34:06 +0200
We're going to use the opportunity presented by this outage to do some more maintenance on jackal's filesystem. As a result, jackal.ru.ac.za will be down from 17:00 on Friday as well.
It is expected that the maintenance work on jackal will take longer than the work being done on the network, with the result that jackal will continue to be unavailable even after connectivity is restored to the rest of campus. Work on jackal should be completed by 21:00.
This will affect students who're trying to make use of the public computer labs or their home space stored on jackal.
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:47:32 +0200
All services were restored on schedule (by 18:20) barring those feeding off the music regional switching centre. This includes law, music, environmental science, eden grove and those residences on st peter's campus.
Service to these areas was restored bt 19:45.
The extended outage in these areas was due to problems gaining physical access to the switching centre in the music department building -- the locks have apparently recently been changed and campus protection no longer hold keys.