noticeboard.ru.ac.za

During the Tuesday, July 2nd maintenance window, maintenance work affecting a number of services will occur, starting at 5:30 PM:

• Data centre connectivity: one of the links between the data centre distribution switches will be upgraded from 1 to 10 Gbps. No outage is expected as during this change, but in the event that a problem does occur, almost all services provided on campus (including telephones) will be unavailable until the problem is resolved.
• Edge router connectivity: one of the links between the Struben edge router and Struben core router will be replaced, resulting in a brief outage during which the Internet will be unreachable from campus and services provided on campus will be unreachable from the Internet.
• DNS/DHCP/NTP server software updates: software on the two servers which provide the DNS resolution, DHCP and NTP services will be updated. You may notice that network applications respond slower than usual during those times when the DNS server which is your PC's primary DNS resolver is unavailable. DNS queries will be answered by the secondary DNS resolver, but only once the request to your PC's primary DNS resolver has timed-out.

This maintenance work is being undertaken in the ITSC-approved scheduled maintenance window, and should be completed before midnight.

In addition to the previously mentioned work, an emergency reboot will be performed on one of the core routers. This will result in a few minutes Internet outage. The reboot will hopefully resolve some instability -- particularly with IPv6 services -- that we've seen recently.