noticeboard.ru.ac.za

The University has been without Internet access since about 22:45 on Friday 20 January. As a result users within the University will not be able to access any external resources, including web pages, off campus e-mail and webmail systems, etc.

External users will not be able to access services located within the University, for instance ROSS, the SEALS library service and the University's web page.

The fault lies within Telkom's infrastructure and was reported to Telkom/SAIX between 23:07 and 23:34. We're currently awaiting a resolution from then. There is no current estimated time to completion for this fault.

Please note that this fault is not related to the scheduled maintenence earlier this evening.

I phoned Telkom for a status update this morning. It appears that the fault wasn't lodged correctly by their night shift and so they had no record of it. It's now been reported (again).

Contractually Telkom usually have 24 hours to resolve a fault. I suspect that they started the clock at 07:50 this morning rather than at 23:34 last night.

According to Telkom, the fault lies on the ATM circuit somewhere between the Huntley Street exchange and the Uitenhague exchange, most likely at the Huntley Street end. We're told that they have technicians on site attending to the problem. They're still unable to give us an estimated time to completion.

Because of the prolonged nature of this outage some machines on campus are having difficulty resolving DNS. This may result in difficulty or perceived "slowness" in accessing resources that are located on campus (for example, http://www.ru.ac.za/ may take a long time to load). This is a side effect of the Internet outage caused by cached DNS objects expiring from our resolvers. This problem will resolve itself once Internet access is restored.

Internet access was restored about five minutes ago (14:10). It may take a couple of hours for services to stabilise.