noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Some students will currently find that they cannot log in to a number of University systems, most often with an error that their password is incorrect. In most instances, it is the authenticators that are behaving erroneously, rather than an actual problem with usernames and passwords. Applications that are known to be affected especially badly are ROSS (most students cannot log in) and the caching proxy servers (students will be able to log in intermittently).

The cause of this problem is known, and it appears to have occurred at 20:42 last night. Whilst we'll attempt to resolve this issue as soon as possible, we cannot guarantee this will happen before Monday (see after hours support).

This problem will not affect staff or guest logins.

There is now a temporary workaround in place. This workaround does not fix the underlying problem, but should allow students to log in to the caches and ROSS again.

The underlying cause of this problem is a change in the way student data is processed. Whilst it affects authentication, this is not the only thing it affects. In particular, the display of information in ROSS may currently be incomplete or incorrectly formatted. These problems are not fixed by the temporary workaround we've put in place, and are considered to be of a lower priority than the authentication problem. As such, these cosmetic issues will only be fixed once the underlying problem is resolved.

Work on resolving the underlying student data problem will only take place during working hours on Monday. This means that there is a slim chance that the authentication problem may reoccur during the course of the weekend.

This problem should now be resolved. Both the information displayed by ROSS, and the authentication data should now be correct.

Please report any outstanding problems with ROSS to webmaster@ru.ac.za.

We've discovered one outstanding issue: printing requests made through ROSS have not been processed since Friday. We're in the process of trying to fix this problem, and all outstanding printing credit requests should be processed by 3.30PM today.