noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At about 5.50AM this morning, Rhodes lost access to the Internet for reasons as yet unknown. Users will likely experience the outages as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites hosted off campus.

We have reported the problem to our service providers, and are awaiting feedback.

We've just been informed by Neotel that this is "scheduled maintenance" occurring on one of the fibre legs that connects Grahamstown. We're told that it will be completed by 4PM this afternoon.

In terms of our service agreements, Rhodes is supposed to receive written notice of all service-affecting scheduled maintenance several days in advance. As this didn't occur in this instance, we still consider this outage to be unscheduled and will be treating it as such. This means that, as it has now exceeded the agreed mean-time-to-repair, we're in the process of escalating it with TENET's service manager.

Apparently the "scheduled maintenance" was supposed to be non-service-affecting. Neotel are currently splicing a fibre optic cable at Megawatt Park (Johannesburg), and all services carried on the affected circuit were supposed to automatically fail onto a protection circuit. Whilst it appears that Rhodes is the only higher educational institution affected by this, it is also affecting large parts of SITA (State IT Agency, servicing government departments, the police, etc).

It seems that the real problem is that the protection circuit failed, which lead to the outage we're currently experiencing. Neotel acknowledge that this is a fault, and are now working to rectify it.

Our connection to the Internet has recovered