During the scheduled monthly maintenance window on Sunday 6th July 2004, work will be done on the two firewalls that provide Rhodes with Internet connectivity. The unusual nature of the changes requires that both redundant firewalls be taken offline at the same time, meaning that all users at Rhodes will be without Internet access of any form (web, external e-mail, ftp, etc) until the process is complete.
All incoming (and outgoing) e-mail that arrives (or is sent) during the outage will be queued on various mail servers, and will be delivered once connectivity is restored. It may take several hours for the mail servers to catch up. Internal e-mail will be uneffected.
Users are advised to plan in advance for this outage, which may last anywhere from half an hour to most of the day. Details of when work is scheduled to commence and when it is likely to be finished will be posted closer to the time.