QUOTE(Electrical Manager @ Dec 10 2007, 11:23 PM)
Please note that the supply of electricity to the lower campus will be interrupted between 07h00 and 14h00 on Thursday 20th December 2007.
The areas affected will be from New House in the west to Somerset Street in the west, and from Winchester House in the south to African Street in the
north. All academic as well as residential buildings will be without electricity during the above period.
This power outage is necessary to undertake preventative maintenance at the main substation RU1.
Please note that all electrical circuitry must be treated as live during the outage as the power could be restored at any time.
The areas affected will be from New House in the west to Somerset Street in the west, and from Winchester House in the south to African Street in the
north. All academic as well as residential buildings will be without electricity during the above period.
This power outage is necessary to undertake preventative maintenance at the main substation RU1.
Please note that all electrical circuitry must be treated as live during the outage as the power could be restored at any time.
This power outage will have knock on effects on campus networking and telecommunications.
- Our main data centre in Struben building will run on generator for the duration of the outage. This means that those areas that do have power will continue to have access to core network services. In particular, external access to the University's mail and web servers should be unaffected.
- The University's PBX infrastructure will run off battery power for so long as there's battery capacity. There are four PBX nodes affected by this outage: Main Admin, Struben building, and the Student Union building, Eden Grove.
Main Admin and Struben building provided telephony to the campus at large, and have about eight hours of battery backup. If they're affected, it'll be for a short while towards the end of the power outage. If this happens, it'll disrupt all telephony on campus.
Eden Grove and the Student Union serve local areas (St Peters campus, Eden Grove building [including the Registrar's division], Estates division, Great Hall, the Barratt complex and the Student Union building). These two PBX nodes are backup up by much smaller UPSes and will only stay operational for around half an hour after the power goes off. Once the battery supply to these two nodes is exhausted, telephones in the affected regions will be unreachable until such time as power is restored. - Our Help Desk in Struben building will be without power, and will therefore be unable to deal with all but the most basic queries. Users who still have power should bear this in mind when phoning for support.
- Once power is restored, networking in most of the effected areas will be restored automatically. Users may find that they have to wait for fifteen minutes or so after power has been restored and then reboot their computers before they will be able to connect to the network.
Sometimes network switches do not recover gracefully from power outages. In these instances our network technicians will have to visit the affected areas before connectivity can be restored. This may take several hours to complete. Our monitoring systems will automatically detect the problematic areas, and so there's no need to let us know about them.