noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Neotel have indicated that they intend completing their previously scheduled (and twice cancelled) maintenance between midnight and 4AM this coming Sunday (30 May). If they actually undertake the work this time around, it will likely result in a total Internet outage.

During this maintenance you can expect Internet access to be intermittent or unavailable. You will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access websites. When accessing secure (https://) web sites, your browser may report that the connection has timed out or the site is unreachable.

You are strongly encouraged to plan around this scheduled outage and assume that Internet access will be unavailable for the entire duration of the maintenance window.

Neotel phoned us this morning to arrange physical access to Rhodes' data centre to perform this maintainance work. Given the late hour and short notice, we might not be able to ensure that someone's available to assist them. It is somewhat surprising that, given two previous aborted attempts at this and supposed detailed planning for the change, Neotel only thought to inform us of the requirement thirteen hours in advance...

This change has, once again, been abandoned. Whilst Neotel did indeed arrive on site, they were unable to do anything. It seems that there was a problem with Infraco's network management system that prevented them from accessing all the intervening equipment -- this is the same problem that occurred the first time around.