[Python Wpg] Can python save the University $17,000?

[Sydney Weidman]

On Thu, 2007-27-09 at 09:33 -0500, Mark Jenkins wrote:
> > Also, (and I realize none of this is technically python) would sending 7
> > or 8 thousand text messages jam the system?
> 
> Hmm, the cell phone companies might not allow this many msgs from one
> place in a short time.
> 

Your hunch was right. A quick call to MTS wireless services confirmed
that they flag hosts that more than x messages. They didn't tell me what
x was, but they said sending out 2000 messages (a guesstimate of MTS
customers in the student pop.) to the MTS email gateway would be
considered spam and shut down immediately. Considering the fact that MTS
has about 2/3 of the cell phone market and the student pop is close to
10K, we'd be stopped before we got very far down the list.

Interestingly, the tech person did tell me that another less well known
(but still nevertheless public) services is available on port 444 of
text.mts.net. The service is Simple Network Paging Protocol (SNPP) and
it is described in RFC 1861:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1861.txt

a quick rundown of the commands can be seen at:

http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/snpp.htm

The helpful fellow at MTS even sent me a php snippet that uses the
protocol:

$who = array(‘2045551111’,’2045551112’,’2045551113’);
$t = fsockopen(“text.mts.net”, 444);
for($i = 0;$i < sizeof($who);$i++){
fwrite($t, "PAGE $who[$i]\r\n");
$buf = fgets($t);
fwrite($t, "MESS $message\r\n");
$buf = fgets($t);
fwrite($t, "SEND\r\n");
$buf = fgets($t);
}
fwrite($t, "QUIT\r\n");

No problem reading that code, right? ;-)

Luckily python has an SNPP library:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pysnpp/

Now never having used the library, I can't make any pronouncements, but
at least I have the tools to do the job if I'm asked.

BTW, the head librarian sent a description of my demo to the head of
security and some senior VPs and we've already set up a meeting to talk
about developing this in-house.

> Perhaps the /value/ in the 17K system is some kind of agreement with the
> celluar providers.

possibly, don't know that.

> If you communicated with the celluar providers you may be able to cut
> the 17 K folks out of the loop. Good luck getting through to someone
> with that kind of decision making power!
> 
> 

They assured me that I could broadcast a message to a large number of
MTS customers (rogers also has a public SNPP server) without being shut
down.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts which got me on the right path.

- syd