We are in the process of upgrading the operating system software on several of our core servers. These upgrades address several recent security vulnerabilites that have been detected in the operating systems concerned. Each of the servers that are upgraded need to be rebooted in order to complete the installation.
Shortly before lunch today (12:45, Wed August 11 2003) we'll reboot the one of the web servers (iguana.ru.ac.za) as well as the residence network firewall machine (slug.ru.ac.za).
All residence network users will have no connectivity while their firewall machine reboots. In addition, the services provided by donkey.ru.ac.za will be unavailable.
All web sites residing on iguana (campus.ru.ac.za, forums.ru.ac.za, noticeboard.ru.ac.za, ditcheonline.tenet.ac.za, cran.ru.ac.za, emis.ru.ac.za, etc) will be unavailable while the web server reboots.
The machines normally take under five minutes to boot, so assuming than nothing goes wrong, the services provided by these machines should be restored in fairly short order.