noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At about 1.30AM this morning we lost access to most of the Internet as a result of a problem affecting SANReN's Port Elizabeth point of presence. This may or may not be a continuation of the problem that occurred yesterday afternoon.

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.

The problem was reported to TENET's service desk at 7.20AM this morning.

Normally during Internet outages we have a contingency plan in place that allows email to continue to flow freely via a small backup circuit. As a result of the National Arts Festival, that circuit is not available. This means that this outage includes email -- email sent during the outage will be queued for later delivery.

Connectivity was restored about an hour ago, and appears stable.

The root-cause of this problem (which was a continuation of what we experienced yesterday) was a failed fibre optic interface on the SANReN router in Port Elizabeth. This has now been replaced.