After Hours Support

Routine Support

The Information Technology Division does not have the staffing or resources to provide support for routine problems outside of normal working hours (weekdays between 08:30–12:45 & 14:00–16:30). Whilst you are welcome to e-mail our Help Desk (support@ru.ac.za) at any time of the day or night, you'll normally only get a response during our office hours.

Stand-by Capability

At certain times of the year, and by prior arrangement well in advance, the Information Technology Division can and does have support and technical staff on stand-by outside of normal office hours. This typically only happens during major University-wide events such as academic and administrative registration. Such arrangements may incur costs.

At all other times, no after hours stand-by capability exists.

Major Outages

Informal arrangements exist to help alleviate the problems caused by major outages of critical systems that occur outside of normal office hours. Our network monitoring system keeps track of such problems on a 24×7×365 basis and will automatically alert appropriate systems and/or network administrators.

These administrators may choose to work on resolving such problems after hours at their own convenience and discretion. As there is neither funding allocated to this, nor formal contractual arrangements governing this, after hours response to such problems is provided on a best-effort basis and relies on the availability and generosity of our staff. No guarantees whatsoever can or will be made.

In this regard, "major outages of critical systems" includes only those outages or problems that directly impact on the productivity of more than a hundred people on several different parts of the campus. Network outages in single buildings, or problems affecting small numbers of people, will not normally be considered major or critical and will typically only be resolved during normal office hours.

In the case of localised network outages (such as faults as a result of power outages), physical access to the various buildings on campus after hours is usually a problem. We often need to gain access to several different buildings to resolve a single fault. Experience shows that frequently the necessary keys and/or staff are not available and significant amounts of time are wasted futilely trying to gain access. For this reason we do not normally attempt to resolve such problems outside of office hours even when they do affect large numbers of people.  (And if we do, we will only make a limited number of attempts to gain access.)

The Student Networking service, and particularly networking in residences, is viewed as a convenience service and therefore outages of this service never constitute a "major outage of a critical system". Students can make use of public computer labs after hours.

Reporting Major Outages

There is no way other than our automated monitoring system to report such outages. E-mail sent to our Help Desk (support@ru.ac.za) might get read.

Emergencies

In instances where there's a risk of imminent physical damage to ICT infrastructure (such as a fire, flood, theft, etc), you should inform the Campus Protection Unit who will respond in terms of the University's emergency management plan.  In an emergency CPU can be reached on 046 603 8999 or at their offices in Rhodes avenue.

All our network distribution centres have signage that uniquely identifies their location and provides emergency contact details.  Should you be reporting a problem with one of these locations, please make a note of the information on the sign.