noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Neotel have just requested our consent to perform emergency maintenance on a fibre optic cable that forms part of Rhodes' connection to the Internet. They intend commencing work at 4.30AM on Sunday 8 November, and should be completed before 7AM (note that this maintenance work will exceed Neotel's scheduled maintenance window by one hour). It is service-affecting, and during this time Rhodes will have intermittent or no access to the Internet. Users will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites hosted off campus.

We have made it clear to Neotel that they're not to exceed the one hour grace period that we've given them, so as not to inconvenience users of the SEALS library service.

Neotel have simultaneously informed us that they'll be conducting non-service-affecting maintenance on a different part of the fibre. This work will start at 7AM on Saturday 7 November and should be completed by 11AM. During this maintained, Rhodes' Internet traffic should be carried on a separate protection circuit. We should therefore not experience any outage.

It appears that we've just lost access to the Internet. At this stage I strongly suspect that it's related to the work that Neotel were doing, and that they've exceeded their approved maintenance window (they originally requested 7AM-11AM, which we declined in favour of the previously advertised 4.30AM-7AM). I'm attempting to get confirmation of this.

It appears that the outage affects Rhodes and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.