- 2022/01/18 - Scheduled maintenance, 18 January
- During the Tuesday, 18 January maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
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.
Alumni House
Bangor House
Botany Building
Catering and Housekeeping HQ
Education Building (original building and new extensions)
Geography Building
HKE Building
School of Languages
Life Sciences Building
Main admin (north side)
Psychology Building
Selwyn Castle
Stables (DIFS)
St Peters Building
Theatre/RBS Building
Wi-Fi: software will be updated on Wi-Fi access points in the buildings listed below. Wi-Fi services will be unavailable in areas of the buildings as each access point is updated, which takes around 10 minutes.
19 Somerset St
23, 33 South St
2, 3 Croft St
Allan Webb Dining Hall
Allen St Flats
Alumni House switchboard office
Catering Stores
Continuing Education Centre
Chessington Court
Confucius Centre
Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences Building
Day Care Centre
Drostdy Dining Hall
Fish farm
Founders Dining Hall
Founders Lodge
Grounds and Gardens HQ
Health Care Centre
Highway Africa Building
Hobson Dining Hall
ISER Annexe
John Kotze Annexe
Kimberley Dining Hall
Law Clinic
Library
Maintenance stores
Nelson Mandela Dining Hall
Old Laundry
PSAM
Royal Engineers Building (DIFS)
Jan Smuts Dining Hall
St Mary Dining Hall
Stockenstrom Place
Waainek Tick Research
Victoria Mxenge housekeeping office
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.
- 2021/12/14 - Scheduled electrical maintenance, 14-15 December
- Updated, 13 December, 15:00:
On 14 December 2021, electrical maintenance will interrupt power to all parts of campus on the western side of South St/Rhodes Ave.
On 15 December 2021, electrical maintenance will interrupt power to a large area of campus. The affected area is from African St to Beaufort St (including Winchester House) and from Somerset St to South St/Rhodes Ave (including CPU, Dingemans and Psychology Clinic).
The notification from Electrical Services is on toplist.
The impact on network services will be:
In each area, provided all of the necessary generators are operational, buildings which do have access to generator power will have access to network services.
All buildings in each area which do not have access to generator power will not have access to network services (including Wi-Fi and telephones).
Buildings outside of the affected area on each day will have access to network services.
All services normally accessible from the Internet will continue to operate.
- 2021/12/01 - Card-based access control migration, beginning 1 December [update 9 Dec]
- Starting from the evening of 1 December, the staff/student card access control system in the buildings listed below will be migrated to new server software.
From that time, existing cards will provide access as before, but it will not be possible to issue new/replacement cards or grant additional access to existing cards.
During the course of the week of 6 December, it will be possible to issue new cards, but they will only be usable on buildings which have completed their migration to the new software. That process of migrating each building will begin on 6 December, though it is not yet clear how long it will take to migrate all of the buildings to the new software.
Affected buildings:
Africa Media Matrix
Struben Building
Geography Building
Hamilton Building
Biko Building
Health Suite
Physics Building
New Arts Building
Eden Grove Building
ELRC
Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences Building
Library
Life Sciences Building
School of Languages
Education Building
Theatre Building
5 Prince Alfred St
Update, 9 December: We are in the process of migrating the old P2000 access control system to a C-Cure access control system due to end of life of the P2000 system in January 2022. The process requires some hardware installation and cutover. The process began on Monday 6th December. Unfortunately the team has been hit by Covid and quarantine requirements. Buildings that were to be migrated this week will be done in January. The Library, Struben and New Arts are complete. The remaining buildings below will still have access control working but no new cards can be added to the access control database until the migration is complete.
- 2021/12/07 - Scheduled maintenance, 7 December
- During the Tuesday, 7 December 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:
IMAP discontinuation: as part of the process of discontinuing IMAP mailboxes which have been migrated to Gmail, the following will occur. Should these changes affect your access to email, please contact support@ru.ac.za (046 603 8288) for advice on alternatives.
The webmail service at https://webmail.ru.ac.za/ will be shut down.
All IMAP mailboxes will be set to read only. Existing messages in mailboxes will still be accessible, but it will not be possible to move messages into IMAP mailboxes.
Access switches: software will be updated on the network switches in the buildings listed below. All network services (including Wi-Fi and IP telephones) may be disrupted in those buildings for up to 30 minutes.
19 Somerset St
4 Gilbert St
5 Rhodes Ave
Adamson House
Allan Gray House
Allen Flats
Amina Cachalia House
Atherstone House
Beethoven House workshops
Beit House
Botany (front Schonland Building section only)
Campus Protection Unit HQ
Canterbury Annexe
Celeste House
Charlotte Maxeke House
Chris Hani House
Confucius Centre
Continuing Education Centre
Cullen Bowles House
De Beers House
Drostdy Lodge
Ellen Kuzwayo House
Enoch Sontonga House
Fine Art Photography
Goldfields House
Guy Butler House
Helen Joseph House and Annexe
Highway Africa Building
Hilltop 7, 8 and 9 Houses
Hilltop Hall admin block
ILAM
Joe Slovo House
Library (certain L3/L4 areas only)
Lincoln House
Livingstone House
Margaret Smith House
New House
Oakdene House
Olive Schreiner House
Oriel House and Annexe
Prince Alfred House
Robert Sobukwe House
Royal Engineers Building
Ruth First House
Sisulu House
Stanley Kidd House and Annexe
Stockenstrom Place
Thomas Pringle House
Victoria Mxenge House
Walker House
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
Webmail
Mailing lists
SMS
Provisioning (web proxy autodiscovery)
Wi-Fi and VPN authentication
CHERTL Evaluation Assistant
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)
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.
- 2021/11/30 - Scheduled maintenance, 30 November
- During the Tuesday, 30 November maintenance window, maintenance work will affect certain services, starting at 5:30 PM and being completed before midnight. The following work is planned:
VPN: support for VPN connections using the L2TP/IPsec protocol will be discontinued. If you find that you're no longer able to connect to the VPN service, please configure your PC to connect using the SSTP or IKEv2 protocols by following the instructions for Windows or macOS.
PBX: the university telephone system will need to be restarted. We expect that all phones (IP telephones and emergency phones) will be unable to make or receive calls for around 15 minutes. Phones will likely show a message reading "Discover 146.231.128.90" during that time.
This work has been attempted a number of times in the past but, due to technical difficulties, and despite support from our PBX support provider and the software vendor, we have not been able to successfully complete it. We will be working with our PBX support provider to attempt the change once again.
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.