noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Neotel have given notice that they intend to perform scheduled maintenance on Rhodes' Internet connection on Sunday 20 February 2011. Work will commence at 06:00 and should be completed by 12:00.

Whilst this work is in progress, Rhodes will have intermittent or no access to the Internet. You will likely experience this outage as an ERR_DNS_FAIL or ERR_CONNECT_FAIL error when trying to access the Internet. When accessing secure (https://) web sites, your browser may report that the connection has timed out or the site is unreachable.

During this time, Infraco (on behalf of Neotel) will be decommissioning the existing microwave link that connects Rhodes to Albany substation (and then onwards to Port Elizabeth), and commissioning a new fibre optic link to replace it. The nature of the maintenance may involve work on live power lines, and for obvious safety reasons such work can only be done during daylight hours. For this reason it is scheduled outside the normal Sunday maintenance window.

Rhodes connection to the Internet has been shut down in preparation for this work. As a result, 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.

However, a different problem is preventing the work from going ahead. In order to perform the work, at least one Eskom power circuit needed to be shut down, but the Eskom work order listed the incorrect power circuit. As a result, the power circuit which needed to be shut down now cannot be shut down.

It is expected, but not confirmed, that our connection to the Internet will be restored within an hour.

We've received a message which appears to indicate that the scheduled maintenance should not be causing the current outage, so we've contacted the TENET service desk to ask them to ask Neotel to investigate further.

The TENET service desk have not yet been able to get relevant feedback from Neotel regarding this outage. The service desk are continuing to follow up, and we've requested that they escalate the matter as soon as the escalation procedure allows.

Shortly after 11 AM, we heard that Neotel were busy with other maintenance work which was causing today's outage. At the time, they were trying to effect a permanent fix to replace the temporary fix implemented for the outage which occurred on Tuesday. This maintenance in P.E. appears to have been scheduled to coincide with today's scheduled maintenance, but I don't believe we were notified of the maintenance.

It was due to be completed by 12 o'clock, so I'll be contacting the service desk again shortly.

We're now awaiting feedback from Neotel via the TENET service desk.

We've been told that the maintenance work in P.E. has taken longer than expected, but is now expected to be complete in approximately 15 minutes.

It seems that Internet access was restored a few minutes ago.