Sat, 13 May 2006 08:12:55 +0200
Since about 2AM this morning Rhodes has had no external national or international connectivity. Connectivity to other South African universities is, for the time being, unaffected. This is caused by a fault somewhere on TENET's backbone network and Telkom inform us that it is affecting all South African universities. They do not have an estimate of the time to resolution, although they are working on the problem.
Sat, 13 May 2006 12:42:30 +0200
There's still no word from Telkom as to either the cause of this, or when they expect to have it resolved.
As a result of the prolonged nature of this outage, some of our cached DNS records are starting to expire. This means that over the next few hours, more and more South African academic sites will become unreachable, in spite of the fact that we still have perfectly functional routing to them.
This same DNS expiry will affect connectivity within the University. You'll notice it initially as connections taking longer to open. If the outage is long enough, DNS within the University will also cease to work correctly.