- 2025/04/29 - Scheduled maintenance, 29 April
- During the Tuesday, 29 April maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
Distribution routers: software will be updated on the routers serving all buildings in the areas listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) may be disrupted in those areas for up to 30 minutes.
Main campus: all buildings in the area within Prince Alfred St, Somerset St and Lucas Avenue, up to and including Biological Sciences Building, the Library and Psychology
Off campus: all buildings east of Somerset St
Hill campus: all buildings which are on the south side of Prince Alfred St and west of New House (inclusive).
Distribution routers: software will be updated on the routers serving the university data centres. All services hosted in data centres are likely to be affected for at least brief outages, possibly for as long as an hour in the event of an unexpected problem.
Access switches: software will be updated on the network switches in the buildings listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) will be disrupted in those buildings. For smaller buildings, the work might be completed in 30 minutes, while larger buildings may take up to 90 minutes.
Drostdy Barracks
Hobson Kitchen
Storage systems: software on storage switches will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected, though an unexpected failure during the upgrade would cause an outage affecting almost all services.
This work is being conducted during a minor maintenance period. Should there be a compelling reason why this work should not go ahead as planned, please contact support@ru.ac.za before 3:00 PM on Tuesday.
- 2025/04/22 - Scheduled maintenance, 22 April
- During the Tuesday, 22 April maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
IP Telephones: software will be updated on all Yealink IP telephones. Each phone will install the new software and reboot twice, a process which will take around 10 minutes to complete.
Distribution routers: software will be updated on the routers serving all buildings in the areas listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) may be disrupted in those areas for up to 30 minutes.
St Peters campus: all buildings south of Lucas Avenue.
Access switches: software will be updated on the network switches in the buildings listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) will be disrupted in those buildings for around 30 minutes.
26a, 70, 73 and 74 African St
29 and 33 South St
3, 5 and 6 Gilbert St
Adamson Annexe
Allan Webb dining hall
Building Maintenance headquarters
Chessington flats
Catering and Housekeeping headquarters
Day Kaif
Drostdy Barracks
King Field club house
College House
Facilities and Infrastructure offices
Founders dining hall
Grounds and Gardens headquarters
The Hangar
Health Care Centre
Health Suite
Law Clinic
Maintenance Stores
New House annexes
Politics
PSAM
Psychology Clinic
The Retreat
Salisbury House
Stables
Starling House
Swimming pool office
Internet edge routers: the software on one of the two edge routers will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected as all network traffic should be handled by the other edge router.
Core router software update: the software on one of the two core routers will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected as all network traffic should be handled by the other core router.
This work is being conducted during a minor maintenance period. Should there be a compelling reason why this work should not go ahead as planned, please contact support@ru.ac.za before 3:00 PM on Tuesday.
- 2025/04/15 - Scheduled maintenance, 14 and 15 April
- We've been notified by TENET that maintenance will be undertaken on one of the routers which provides TENET's Internet access services to the university. Work will begin at 10:00 PM on Monday, 14 April, and is expected to take two hours to complete.
This work ought not to cause a major Internet outage for the university as connectivity should still be provided by TENET's other router and our commercial Internet service provider. However, it is possible that temporary disruption to Internet connections may occur as TENET's work begins.
The same upgrade was successfully performed on the alternate TENET router on .
During the Tuesday, 15 April maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
Distribution routers: software will be updated on the routers serving all buildings in the areas listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) may be disrupted in those areas for up to 30 minutes.
North and west campus: all buildings north of Prince Alfred St.
PBX: software on the university telephone system will be updated . We expect that all phones (IP telephones, mobile app and web client) will be unable to make or receive calls for a period of around 15 minutes.
Access switches: software will be updated on the network switches in the buildings listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) will be disrupted in those buildings. For smaller buildings, the work might be completed in 30 minutes, while larger buildings may take up to 90 minutes.
GLT Building
Literary Studies in English Building
Institute for Nanotechnology Innovation
Furniture and Equipment Stores
Core router software update: the software on one of the two core routers will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected as all network traffic should be handled by the other core router.
Internet edge routers: the software on one of the two edge routers will be updated. No noticeable outage is expected as all network traffic should be handled by the other edge router.
This work is being conducted during a minor maintenance period. Should there be a compelling reason why this work should not go ahead as planned, please contact support@ru.ac.za before 3:00 PM on Tuesday.
- 2025/04/01 - Scheduled maintenance, 1 and 2 April
- We've been notified by TENET that maintenance will be undertaken on one of the routers which provides TENET's Internet access services to the university. Work will begin at 10:00 PM on Wednesday, 2 April, and is expected to take two hours to complete.
This work ought not to cause a major Internet outage for the university as connectivity should still be provided by TENET's other router and our commercial Internet service provider. However, it is possible that temporary disruption to Internet connections may occur as TENET's work begins.
During the Tuesday, 1 April maintenance window, maintenance work affecting a number of services will occur, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
Server software updates: software on the servers which provide the following services will be updated, resulting in outages of up to 15 minutes per server:
DNS
DHCP
NTP
RT
Web proxies
Registration system
Incoming e-mail
Outgoing e-mail
IMAP e-mail mailboxes
Mailing lists
SMS
Provisioning (web proxy autodiscovery)
Wi-Fi and VPN authentication
Network graphs
Network monitoring
Terminal Four content management system
RU Single Sign-On system
Main web server (www.ru.ac.za, etc)
University administration and meal booking systems
SEALS Library consortium services
Network printing services (iPrint/PaperCut)
File servers/home directories (gnu, serval, studentfiles)
PC login service for public labs
Archibus
While we try to publish a list of all service-affecting work here in advance, the list should not be considered exhaustive and other low impact work may also be undertaken during the maintenance window.
This maintenance work is being undertaken in the ITSC-approved scheduled maintenance window.
- 2025/03/25 - Scheduled maintenance, 25 March
- During the Tuesday, 25 March maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
Wireless links: software on point-to-point wireless link devices will be updated. This will cause internet outages of up to 20 minutes in the following buildings:
Mandalay-off-High
One on Luke, Three on Luke
VPN service: software on the router which provides VPN services will be updated. An outage of ten minutes is expected.
WINS service: WINS is no longer recommended by Microsoft and we will discontinue the campus WINS servers. As a first step, the WINS servers will continue to operate, but from Tuesday evening they will no longer be advertised in DHCP responses. No disruption is expected, except for this particular set of circumstances:
Windows file sharing is in use, with a mapped drive letter or a path such as \\server\share;
The file sharing server was specified by its unqualified name (e.g. \\server\share), rather than by its fully qualified DNS name (\\server.subdomain.ru.ac.za\share) or IP address (e.g. \\146.231.1.2\share); and
That file sharing server's DNS name is not directly within .ru.ac.za or, alternatively, the client has been manually configured to use a different DNS suffix.
The recommended solution is to that particular issue is to specify the server by its fully qualified DNS name. If you have difficulty accessing Windows file sharing from Wednesday onwards, please contact support@ru.ac.za for assistance.
This work is being conducted during a minor maintenance period. Should there be a compelling reason why this work should not go ahead as planned, please contact support@ru.ac.za before 3:00 PM on Tuesday.