UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

Since Monday, Channel 9 shows just the "nice" DirecTV logo...
Of course, with all the school closed, and all Resnet people on vacation, nothing gets fixed, at least until Jan. 3, when UCI reopens.
Yet another example why having the university providing Cable services is a really bad idea. With a professional provider, this would have been fixed Monday night already...

In other news, an exploit affecting fully patched Windows machines has been released and has been sighted in the wild, showing once again that tools like CCA can not provide protection against such issues.

It seems there have been some personnel changes in Resnet management.
First, Kevin Ansel, the person responsible for the dual disasters of UCI-operated Cable TV and Resnet's CCA installation, apparently is no longer in UCI Housing. My sources tell me that he was promoted to Interim Director, Student Affairs Information Technology Strategic Planning (they couldn't find a longer title, I guess.)
As usual with administrative jobs, if you screw up, you get promoted... *sigh*

The other interesting change came to us in the form of a Resnet email sent through the Palo Verde Housing office.
It is signed off with

Jason Drake
Interim Manager, Residential Network Services
University of California, Irvine
(949) 824-9543
http://resnet.uci.edu

The fact that Jason Drake, who used to be the #2 at Resnet, is now the Manager of Resnet, even if on an interim basis, indicates to me that Ted Roberge is no longer Resnet's manager. Maybe he got promoted to Kevin Ansel's former position...
Somebody I discussed this with suggested that maybe Jason is only interim manager while Ted is on vacation. However, I think that in such a case, the title would be on the line of "deputy manager."

UCI's Directory, btw, doesn't show any of these changes as of the time of this writing.

Several people have noticed that Resnet apparently hasn't purged the CCA login database this week, so we weren't required to login again this week (so far...)
My take on this is that since UCI's Fall Quarter is over, most undergraduates are out of town, so the tables didn't get as large as usual.
Or the person doing the purge (if it isn't done automatically) is on vacation...

In the meantime, there has been another CCA exploit reported...
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/419645/30/30/threaded
Showing once again that CCA is not an enterprise-quality product...

I previously had provided a link to my CCA login Perl script here.
I had later added a link to a bash script to be runnable from cron. I have now updated this script, to allow the use of a tcp ping, and to provide logging.
The file can be run directly from crond, e.g., every couple of minutes, to check if the network connection is still available. The file checks if it can ping the UCI webserver, and if not, uses the login script to log in to the CCA system. To use the file, update the IP address, UCINetID and password.
Logging data is written to the file .resnet in the home directory.
Program usage:

$: cca -h
Usage: cca [type] [logging]
    type: Ping type (0: ICMP Echo through ping, 1: TCP Ack through nmap).
          Default: 0.
          Option 1 requires nmap to be installed and in the path.
          Get nmap from http://www.insecure.org/
    logging: 1 to log to .resnet in the home directory.

Earlier today, I received an email from a fellow graduate student who has suffered through being disconnected from the network for days only because he followed Resnet's instructions.
It also shows the dismal and absolutely unacceptable level of customer service that Resnet displays. It can only be called disservice... It is always the user's fault, never Resnet's. Up to this day, Resnet has not even found it necessary to acknowledge that their braindead instructions are the only thing to blame. Instead, they whine about not having enough funding"... If they hadn't gone on the idiotic path of buying CCA, a completely broken product from Cisco, they would have had more than enough money to provide a decent networking environment.
Some highlights from the email, with some comments interspersed:

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