LuisRei.com – The Why

I’ve moved my blog outside of FEUP. Why? Because some employees (or maybe it was just one person) of CICA decided to block neacm.fe.up.pt, the server that hosted my blog and others (blogs.fe.up.pt).

When administrator realized that the server was inaccessible from the outside, he asked the networks people to look into it to see if they could fix the problem. They replied something along the lines

“oh! It’s not a problem, I did it on purpose. There’s an option there that can’t exist. We should schedule a meeting to talk about it.”

After some inquiries, the administrator was able to determine what that “option” was. The service in question was promptly removed and they took more than one week to perform the 2 mouse clicks necessary to unblock neacm.fe.up.pt (which includes not only blogs.fe.up.pt but also the recently launched tags.fe.up.pt and the faculty’s mirror service – which WAS an official mirror for a lot of well known stuff like Ubuntu and Apache).

This is shameful. A group of faculty employees with a grudge against a member of a student group (or the entire group) was able to deprive students of several services which were actually funded by the students themselves via the AEFEUP.

Sure it can be claimed that the server had a service that violated the ToS but the proper way to deal with it would have been to notify the administrator which would’ve removed the service probably within the hour – a service that had existed for almost year and a half. But instead what was done was to stealthily block access to the server from the outside and then delay restoring access for as long as they saw fit. Shame!

If this was anyplace other than a public institution in Portugal, the people responsible for this abuse of authority would be fired on the spot. But here, it’s business as usual.

If you’re curious about it, the service, named F(eup)TP and available at http://neacm.fe.up.pt/ftp/ was an FTP proxy powered by net2ftp – it allowed outside access to predefined intranet FTP servers via the web. It was a service provided to everyone at FEUP and was announced via the faculty’s internal mailing list on January 27, 2006 – which means the same people responsible for blocking access to the server now received an email notifying them (and everyone else) of the service more than a year and a half ago. In other others, the people who did this on top of being abusive are also incompetent – shocker. (Not like there’s a single person @ FEUP that doesn’t complain about the poorly maintained network which has more downtime than Paris Hilton — hey I’m talking about her psychiatric condition not about the adult video)

This also has considerable implications for a service such as blogs.fe.up.pt. What if someone posts something there that someone at CICA or for that matter anywhere else doesn’t like? Will they block the entire service again until that post is removed? Sadly, I think that’s a likely scenario.

Personally, I’ve moved my blog outside of FEUP and I know of two other blogs that are likely to follow soon. And what can I say when people ask me if they should use blogs.fe.up.pt instead of some other service? This service was something that made the faculty stand out from others. It was something done by students. It worked well. Now I think it will soon be dead. Killed by a few people who abused their authority because of a personal grudge. Sad indeed.

UPDATE

I forgot to mention exactly how incompetent they are: they blocked IPv4 traffic but failed to block IPv6 traffic. Checkpoint should award them with a “Most Valuable Professional” medal or something.

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