UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

Apparently, Resnet recently has done some changes to their CCA configuration.
It used to be that CCA blocked all network access until logged in. The last version of my CCA login script used that by trying to ping or nmap the UCI webserver.
Since a week or so, CCA does not block all network access anymore. Ping now goes through, as does ssh, even when not logged in.
So I changed my script, to use wget to get the main UCI webpage, and determining if the result contains a redirect to the CCA login page.
The updated script is available here.
Program usage:

Usage: cca [logging]
    logging: 1 to log to .resnet in the home directory.
Note: needs wget installed.
Get wget from http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html

The file can be run directly from crond, e.g., every couple of minutes, to check if the network connection is still available.

Not surprisingly, we have yet another channel outage: channels 31 and 53.
These recurring outages make abundandly clear that the equipment used by the UCI Cable TV experiment is not up to the task. The equipment is obviously not enterprise-grade, and is not designed to run 24/7.
The UCI Housing Administration, i.e., Kevin Ansel, who was recently promoted away from his job (if you screw up, you get promoted...), has clearly failed to do their due diligence when selecting their Cable TV provider. The provider they chose, Campus Televideo, was only able to provide the cheapest offer because they skimped on the equipment and use consumer-grade receivers. Originally, they used receivers from Dish Network which broke down pretty much immediately. Outage data collected by this site and others eventually resulted in a change to DirecTV, still with the same reseller, Campus Televideo. While the DirecTV receivers are more robust, they obviously have reached their breaking points now, as the increasing number of outages over the last month and a half shows. Consumer-grade receivers are just not suitable for 24/7 operation.
The Housing Administration should either scrap the Cable TV experiment, or change to a real provider who knows what they are doing. Campus Televideo is clearly not up to the task, and should never have been selected in the first place.

And once again, the weekend is there, and Cable TV is broken.
The outage of the day for Sunday: Channel 23...
The DirecTV equipment seems to be as broken as the Dish equipment that caused the outages last year.
The UCI experiment trying to be a Cable TV provider is a clear failure.

With the long holiday weekend, these outages are probably going to be around until Tuesday.
This time, it is channels 13 and 59 (13 being off and 59 being distorted.)
It should be made mandatory for somebody from Resnet to live on campus and suffer the same dismal service...

Update: a bunch of other channels went out: channels 7, 24, 35, 49, and 64, all show the DirecTV "screensaver". Channel 59 seems to have re-synchronized.

Shortly before Christmas, I wrote about rumors regarding personnel movement at Resnet and Housing IT.
That has now been confirmed by Ted Roberge in an email.
Excerpts are below:

I was noticing on your blog that you mention changes in Housing IT. No rumor here....I thought I would shoot you a couple of e-mails for your information that explains some of the changes in Student Affairs. Also, as Kevin is moving, I moved up to his chair as Interim, as did Jason Drake to my job as Interim.

Also, CCA was set up to not purge any users over the holidays, and will start that process once again on Monday, 1/9. It is set manually, and has nothing to do with the size of the file as you mention. We didn't want to clear the list when we weren't here.

Channel 9 should be up today. We couldn't get in the building on New Year's day (yes, we actually had someone come in!)...elevators were turned off and Facilities wouldn't come in to open the doors for us. We are working with them to see how to remedy this.

I certainly appreciate such emails, as they seem to indicate a change in customer relations. It can only improve from last year's situation...
One nitpick, though: Trying to fix a cable TV channel on New Year's day is nice, but at that time, it was already out for about a week.