CSC-SY

Folks, earlier this morning I failed to fetch my mail, and attributed PPP timeouts on my end to the usual DNS problems Aloola is infamous for. Having little time on my hands, I did not check the PPP log until in the afternoon when I found out that timeout was due to Thunderbird failing to talk to Gmail servers on ports 995 (POP)and 587 (SMTP). Soon I found that CVS doesn't work either (port 2401) and I cannot access any of the IM networks.

Looking around a bit, I discovered that what I believed to be a "transparent proxy" lets only HTTP (port 80) open, I couldn't even access Gmail via the browser (HTTPS, port 443), in other words, there was absolutely no other way out but through proxy.scs-net.org which leaves out HTTP(S) and FTP, and probably nothing, or very little, else.

I checked the situation again a little while back around 21:30 and, to my surprise, found that everything's back to normal and all ports which I usually count on are open...

I couldn't reach their tech support since their number 9955 gives a "number not in use" message.

Could this be a maintanence issue or a little warning to users about the return of old days of obnoxious proxies?

Well, I was in the faculty today, and they're connected through Aloola ISP, and there were no internet connection they said due to some maintenance issue.
The working number of the tech support now is 18259955 (toll-free)

I doubt that Aloola problems has anything to do with that,
Since that issue is yet to be fixed AFAIK.