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  |     |___ _____ ___ _ _| |_ ___ ___ ___   |  _  |___ ___   | __  |___ _| |
  |   --| . |     | . | | |  _| -_|  _|_ -|  |     |  _| -_|  | __ -| .'| . |
  |_____|___|_|_|_|  _|___|_| |___|_| |___|  |__|__|_| |___|  |_____|__,|___|
  a newsletter by |_| j. b. crawford                       home subscribe rss

>>> 2021-05-19 telephone turrets

Let's talk about a bit of telephone history. Again. Normally, I am more interested in the switching equipment and carriers and not so much in the instruments---that is, the things that you plug in at the end of the line. There are a few that really catch my eye, though, and one of them is of course the phenomena of the trading turret.

A trading turret is a specialized telephone-like device typically used by day traders. The somewhat useless Wikipedia article describes a trading turret as being a specialized key system, which is useless to most people today as key systems are no longer common and few people know what they are. Nonetheless, it is basically true. I will leave out much discussion of key systems here because I will probably talk about them in depth in the future, but a basic explanation is that a key system allows users at multiple telephone instruments to each access all outside lines. This was a popular setup for businesses that were large enough to need multiple outside lines but too small to have a dedicated telephone operator, from their introduction in the 1930s to the development of affordable small PABXs[1] in the '90s.

Key systems still occasionally appear today and the topic can become somewhat muddled because late key systems tended to have "PABX features" and many PABXs, especially in the IP world, have "key system features." But the basic difference can be explained something like this: a PABX connects multiple users to each line, while a key system connects multiple lines to each user. They were often used for similar purposes with the difference being largely one of implementation, but key systems do have their specific niches.

One of those is the item we for some reason call a turret. The term turret is used today almost exclusively to refer to the item made for the securities industry, a trading turret. These formidable tanks of phones often provide multiple handsets and speakers and are more or less identified by a touchscreen or large set of soft buttons that allow one-touch access to a large number of contacts.

These are superficially similar to a large set of line buttons such as is seen on the "receptionist sidecar" available for many business phones---an extra plug-in module that offers a big set of line buttons which can be configured as speed-dials or even one-touch unattended transfers, so that a receptionist can easily transfer calls or call up for people without having to dial extensions all the time. However, turrets are more than just phones with a lot of line buttons.

It kind of raises the question: what is a trading turret? What really differentiates one from, say, a digital PABX phone with a sidecar?

This is just the kind of thing I contemplate in my private moments, but the issue came to the front of my mind when someone provided a mailing list I am a member of with an interesting document [2]. It is the 1974 Bell System Practice (BSP, basically a Bell System standard operating procedure) for the SAC Main Operating Base Turret. BSP 981-202-100 if you are particularly interested.

The document describes a desk-wide system with ten color-coded handsets used at a Strategic Air Command base to give a communications operator quick access to primary and redundant versions of multiple communications lines. For flavor, two of these handsets were red and corresponded to primary and secondary four-wire leased line circuits used for the SAC Primary Alerting System, used to deliver emergency action messages. Here we have a real red telephone, but not to Moscow.

This makes it clear that the term "turret" is not specific to the finance industry, which was actually a bit of a surprise to me. Where, then, did we get the turret as a type of telephone instrument?

The first usage I have found is the Order Turret No. 1, introduced by the Bell system sometime in the early 1930s (exactly date unclear). The No. 1 is essentially a small manual (cord-and-plug) exchange that accommodates multiple user "positions." A series of subsequent Order Turrets, up to at least the No. 4, were produced in the first half of the century.

I was initially a bit unclear on the application of these devices (I found BSPs on them, but these have a great way of describing maintenance and repair in detail without ever saying what the thing is for) until I found an article in the Bell Laboratories Record, an employee magazine, of 1938. The article describes the use of the No. 4, now a more compact design which can be scaled to an arbitrary number of operators, as it was used at Macy's. It is called an Order Turret, it turns out, because it is used to place orders.

The system looks something like this: 20 (or another number, but we'll say 20, which was the capacity of the apparently common Order Turret Number 2) outside lines are assigned sequential numbers at the telephone exchange with busy fall through such that a call to the first line, if it is in use, will connect to the next line, and so on until a free line is found. At the turret, the call "appears" on a jack in front of each attendant. Whichever attendant is not currently busy can insert a plug to answer the call. In this way, the turret system allows a pool of attendants to collectively answer a pool of incoming lines.

But there's more: these attendants are taking telephone orders in a department store, where the actual stock is out on the floor in various departments. So if a customer asks about a particular item, the attendant can insert a plug into a jack for an internal line to that department, ringing a phone on the floor so that the attendant can speak with a salesperson to confirm availability and have the item set aside. The turret is used not only to answer calls, but to simultaneously manage multiple calls between different parties.

So far as I can tell, this is the defining feature of a turret: a turret isn't just used to handle multiple lines (that's a key telephone). A turret isn't just used to have rapid access to many speed dials (that's a receptionist sidecar). A turret is used to make multiple simultaneous calls, by someone who must quickly relay information between multiple parties. Like the telephone order attendant at an old-fashioned department store, the person on communications duty at a SAC command, or an investment banker.

This explains of course why both legacy and modern turrets often feature multiple handsets (the original Order Turrets did not, but the attendant wore a headset that they would move between jacks instead). As telephone systems have become more sophisticated, turrets have as well, and modern turrets often use IP connectivity to provide a mix of features like squawk boxes (permanently open conference lines), presence information, and a feature with various names (sometimes called automatic ringdown although this is not quite accurate) that allows one trader at a turret to call another trader at a turret with no ringing---the call just connects immediately, much like an intercom. All of this can be done very quickly, because the turret provides a large set of pre-programmed buttons for all the people the user is likely to want to contact.

You can already see that the application I've described for these early turrets, of order taking, could be handled differently. An obvious enhancement is to actively distribute calls to available attendants instead of presenting calls at all attendant stations and waiting for someone to pick up. Indeed, the Order Turret No. 4 did exactly this, actively "pushing" each incoming call to an available attendant. This increase in sophistication, to actively routing calls, really blurred the line between the order turret and the PABX, which Bell was well aware of. The No. 4 was less an order turret in the sense of previous designs, and more just a feature of a PABX.

The order lines, instead of being dedicated lines going straight to turrets, were just the normal incoming lines of the business PABX. The business PABX allocated calls to attendants sitting at the No. 4 stations. This is basically how modern inward call center systems work, and it seems that over time the concept of the "order turret" faded away as these call center queue systems became just another feature of a PABX.

Turrets found few niches in which to hold on. The SAC command turret tells a bit of a story about the close relationship between the Cold War defense complex and the Bell System. Large portions of SAC infrastructure were essentially contracted to AT&T, and so AT&T apparently drew on their background with order turrets in developing the concept for the SAC communications system, which in its totality consisted of a dizzying number of two- and four-wire leased lines and radio links unified by these eight-foot-wide turrets. They even controlled the sirens.

No doubt there were other turrets designed by Ma Bell, although I have struggled to find them. The Order Turret series seems to have died away by the mid-century, but the SAC command turret likely remained in use into the '80s at least. Can we find any others?

An obvious application for a turret-like system is in police and fire dispatch, where in many smaller communities emergency calls were taken directly by the dispatcher who then had to relay information on the radio. Indeed, various vendors have sold telephone equipment for dispatch and public safety answering points (PSAPs, where 911 is answered) described as turrets, but the terminology does not seem to have caught on as strongly in that field. I would suspect this is because radio equipment was often more important in these early dispatch centers than telephone, and indeed the complex communications consoles in public safety dispatch centers usually come from radio vendors (e.g. Motorola) rather than telephone. Radio vendors usually just call these "dispatch consoles" and they have gone through a similar evolution from electromechanical to IP.

There is one exception which stands out: in the city of Boston, the central dispatch office is apparently colloquially referred to as "the turret." The recordings of police radio traffic, sometimes used as evidence in court, are often referred to as "turret tapes" in Massachusetts. I am not certain that the terms are related but it would seem likely; I would speculate that at some point in history the concept of dispatchers using turrets turned into dispatchers working at the turret.

The funny thing here is that I've gone on for a long time without addressing my original interest: why is it called a turret? Well, after all the digging through BSPs and newspaper archives and a whole detour through court records, I still haven't quite answered that question. No one seems to have written down an etymology.

All I can offer is this theory: while turret most directly refers to a tower, through the path of gun turrets it has also come to refer to something that rotates (e.g. in the case of a turret lathe). The original Order Turrets consisted of a rectangular table around which four attendants would sit, two on each side. Perhaps they were called turrets because the attendants sat in a circle and the duty to answer the next call rotated around.

Just a guess.

[1] Today we usually just use the term PBX, for Private Branch eXchange. I specify PABX, for Private Automatic Branch eXchange, in the historical context because for decades the term "PBX" referred mostly to manual boards with dedicated operators, which used to be common in businesses, hotels, etc. A PABX is an automatically switched system, basically the PBX equivalent of the introduction of dialing.

[2] I am leaving the person and list here anonymous out of respect for the community's privacy, although it is an excellent resource if you're interested in these topics and I feel a bit bad for not giving credit. The name of the list rhymes with, uhh, OldDoorBombs.

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>>> 2021-05-10 lightweight as in ldap

Programming note: I have posted two videos to my poorly-tended YouTube account. They are part two of the video about Manzano base, and a rough version of a conference presentation on security of aviation radionavigaton technologies.

I've mentioned LDAP several times as of late. Most recently, when I said I would write about it. And here we are! I will not provide a complete or thorough explanation of LDAP because doing so would easily fill a book, and I'm not sure that I'm prepared to be the kind of person who has written a book on LDAP. But I will try to give you a general understanding of what LDAP is, how it works, and why it is such a monumental pain in the ass.

I've also mentioned it, though, in the context of the OSI protocols. This is because LDAP is a direct descendent of one of the great visions of the OSI project: a grand, unified directory infrastructure with global addressability and integration with the other OSI protocols. This is an example of the ambition and failure of the OSI concept: in practice, directory services have proven to be fairly special-purpose, limited to enterprise environments, and intentionally limited in scope (e.g. kept internal for security reasons). OSI contemplated a directory infrastructure which was basically the opposite in every regard. It did not survive to the modern age, except in various bits and pieces which are still widely used in... once again, crypto infrastructure. Common crypto certificate formats are ASN.1 serialized (as we mentioned last week) because they are from the OSI directory service, X.500.

Before we get into the weeds, though, let's understand the high level objectives. What even is a directory, or a directory service?

It's a digital telephone directory.

This answer is so simple and naive that it almost cannot be true, and yet it is. Remember that the whole OSI deal was in many ways a product of the telephone industry, and that the telephone industry has always favored more complex, powerful, integrated solutions over simpler, independent, but composable solutions. One thing the telephone industry knew well, and had a surprisingly sophisticated approach to, was the white pages.

If you think about it, the humble telephone directory was a surprisingly central component of the bureaucracy of the typical 1970s enterprise. Today, historians often review archived institutional and corporate telephone directories as a way to figure out the timelines of historical figures. Corporate histories often use the telephone directory as a main organizing source, since it documents both the changing staff and the changing structure of the organization (traditional corporate directories often had an org chart in the front pages to boot!).

Across the many functional areas of a business, the telephone directory was a unifying source of truth---or authority---for the structure and membership of the organization. For consumer telephone service, directories had a less complex structure but were an undertaking in their own way due to the sheer number of subscribers. Telephone providers put computers to work at the job of collecting, sorting, and printing their subscriber's directory entries very early on. The information in the published white pages was an excerpt or report from the company's subscriber rolls, and so was closely tied to other important functions like billing and service management.

Inside the industry, the directory referred to all this and more: the unified, authoritative information on the users of the system.

This concept was extended to the world of computing in the form of X.500 and its accompanying OSI network protocols for access to X.500 information. At its root, LDAP is an alternative protocol to access X.500, and so there are substantial similarities between X.500 and the X.500-like substance that we now refer to as an LDAP server. In fact, there is no such thing as an "LDAP server" in the sense that LDAP remains a protocol to access an X.500 compliant directory, but in practice LDAP is now usually used with backends that were designed specifically for LDAP and avoid much of the complexity of X.500 in the sense of the OSI model. The situation today is such that "X.500" and "LDAP" are closely related concepts which are difficult to fully untangle; X.500 is very much alive and well if you accept the caveat that it is only used in the constrained form of corporate directories accessed by alternative methods [1].

The basic structure of X.500 is called the Directory Information Tree, or DIT. The DIT is a hierarchical database which stores objects that possess attributes, which are basically key-value pairs belonging to the object. Objects can be queried for based on their attributes, using a form called the Distinguished Name. DNs are made up of a set of attributes which uniquely identify an object at each level of the hierarchy. For example, an idealized X.500 DN, in the same notation as used by LDAP/LDIF (notation for DNs varies by X.500 protocol), looks like this: cn=J. B. Crawford,ou=Blogger,o=Seventh Standard,c=us. This DN identifies an object by, from top to bottom, country, organization, organizational unit, and common name. Common name is an attribute which contains a human-readable name for the object and is, conventionally, widely used for the identification of that object.

Note some things about this concept: first, the structure is rooted in the US. How does the namespace work, exactly? Who determines organizations under countries? Originally, X.500 was intended to be operated much like DNS, as a distributed system of many servers operating a shared namespace. Space in that namespace would be managed through a registry, which would be SRI or Network Solutions or whatever [2].

Second, this whole concept of identifying objects by attributes seems like it's very subject to conventions. It is, but you must resist the urge to hear "hierarchical store of objects with attributes" and think of X.500 as being a lightly-structured, flexible data store like a modern "NoSQL." In reality it is not, X.500 is highly structured through the use of schemas.

We mostly use the term "schema" when talking about relational databases or markup languages. X.500 schemas serve the same function of describing the structure of objects in the DIT but look and feel different because they are highly object-oriented. That is, an X.500 schema is made up of classes. Classes can be inherited from other classes, in which case their attributes are merged. Resultingly there is not only a hierarchy of data, but of types. Objects can be instances of multiple classes, in which case they must provide the attributes of all of those classes, which may overlap. It's seemingly simple but can get confusing very fast.

Let's illustrate this by taking a look at a common X.500 class: organizationalPerson, or 2.5.6.7. What's up with that number? Remember the whole snmp thing? Yes, X.500 makes use of OIDs to, among other things, identify classes. That said, we commonly (and especially in the case of LDAP) deal only with their names.

While organizationalPerson does not require any attributes, it suggests things like these:

You will notice that this list is dated, and missing obvious things like name. The former is because it is in fact very old, the latter is because organizationalPerson is an auxiliary class and so is intended to be applied to objects only in addition to other classes. Namely, organizationalPerson is usually applied to objects alongside Person, which has some basics like:

You will notice that this class both overlaps with organizationalPerson on telephoneNumber, but also has some odd things like assistant that seem to be specific to an organization. Why the two different classes, then? Conway observed that the structure of systems resembles the structure of their creators; X.500 is no exception. organizationalPerson was written more as part of an effort to represent organizations than as part of an effort to represent people, these two efforts were not as well harmonized as you would hope for.

An object has a "primary" or "core" type. This is referred to as its structural class, and the class itself must be specially marked as structural. This is important for several reasons that are mostly under the hood of the X.500 implementation, but it's useful to know that Person is a structural class... so an X.500 entry representing a human being should have a core type of Person, but in most cases will have multiple auxiliary types bolted on to provide additional information.

That's a lot about the conceptual design of X.500... or really just the core concept of the data structure, ignoring basically the entire transactional concept which is more complicated than you could ever imagine. It's enough to get more into LDAP, though.

Before we go fully into the LDAPverse, though, it's useful to understand how LDAP is really used. This swerves right from OSI to one of my other favorite topics, Network Operating Systems [3].

For a group of computers to act like a unified computing environment, they must have a central concept of a user. This is most often thought of in the context of authentication and authorization, but a user directory is also necessary to enable features like messaging. Further, the user directory itself (e.g. the ability to use the computer as a telephone directory) is considered a feature of a network computing environment in its own right.

In almost all network computing environments, this user directory is descended from X.500. This is seen in the form of Microsoft Active Directory for Windows (modern Windows does not actually use LDAP to interact with the AD domain controller, but instead a different directory access implementation called NT LAN Manager or NTLM), and LDAP for Linux and MacOS (we will not discuss NIS for Linux now, but perhaps in the future).

In these systems, the directory server acts as the source of basic information on the user. Consider another important LDAP class, PosixAccount. PosixAccount adds attributes like uid, homeDirectory, and gecos that reflect the user account metadata expected by POSIX [4]. It is possible to perform authentication against LDAP as well, but it comes with limitations and security concerns that make it uncommon in practice for operating systems. Both Windows and Unix-like environments now generally use Kerberos for authentication.

Many things have changed in the transition from the grand vision of X.500 to the reality of LDAP for information on user accounts. First, the concept of a single unified X.500 namespace has been wholly abandoned. It's complex to implement, and it's not clear that it's something anyone ever wanted, anyway, as federation of directories between organizations brings significant security and compliance concerns.

Instead, modern directories usually use DNS as their root organizational hierarchy. This basically involves cramming shim objects into the DIT that reflect the DNS hierarchy. The example DN I mentioned earlier would more often be seen today as cn=J. B. Crawford,dc=computer,dc=rip. dc here is Domain Component, and domain components are represented in the same order as in DNS because LDAP uses the same confused right-to-left hierarchical representation (AD does it the correct way around).

Another major change has been to the structure. The original intention was that the X.500 hierarchy should represent the structure of the organization. This is uncommon today, because it introduced a maintenance headache (moving objects around the directory as people changed positions) and didn't have a lot of advantages in practice. Instead LDAP objects are more commonly grouped by their high-level purpose. For example, user accounts are often placed in an OU called "accounts" or "users." All in all, this marks a more general trend that LDAP has become a system only for software consumption, and there is minimal concern today about LDAP being browseable by human users.

So let's consider some details of how LDAP works. First off, LDAP is a binary protocol that uses a representation based on ASN.1. That said, LDAP is almost always used with LDAP Data Interchange Format, or LDIF, which is a textual representation. So it's very common to talk about LDAP "data" and "objects" in LDIF format, but understand that LDIF is just a user aid and is not how LDAP data is represented "in actuality."

LDAP provides more or less the verbs you would expect: ADD, DELETE, MODIFY. These are not especially interesting. The SEARCH operation, however, is where much of the in-use complexity of LDAP resides. SEARCH is a general-purpose verb to retrieve information from an LDAP DIT, and it is built to be very flexible. At its simplest, SEARCH can be invoked with a baseObject (a DN) and a scope of BaseObject, which just causes the server to return exactly the object identified by the DN.

In a more complex application, SEARCH can be invoked with a base path representing a subtree, a scope of wholeSubtree (means what it says), and a filter. The filter is a prefix-notation conditional statement that is applied to each candidate object; objects are only returned if the filter evaluates to true.

We can put these SEARCH concepts together into a very common LDAP SEARCH application, which is locating a user in a directory. A common configuration for a piece of software using LDAP for authentication would be:

baseObject: ou=users,dc=computer,dc=rip

scope: singleLevel

filter: (&(objectClass=PosixAccount)(uid=$user))

The $user here is a substitution tag which will be replaced by the user's username. Confusingly, in the PosixAccount class, uid refers to the user name while uidNumber is the value we usually refer to as uid.

A real headache comes about with groups. In authorization applications like RBAC, you commonly want to get the list of groups a user is a member of to make authorization decisions. There are multiple norms for representing groups in LDAP. Groups can have a list of accounts which are members, or accounts can have a list of groups they are a member of. Both are in common use, generally the former for Windows and the latter for UNIX-likes. This is where the flexibility of the filter expression becomes important: whatever "direction" the LDAP server represents the relationship, it's possible to go "the other way" by querying for the object type that contains the list with a filter expression that the list must contain the thing you're looking for. Because finding all users in a group is a less common requirement than finding all groups a user is in, a lot of LDAP clients in practice make somewhat narrow assumptions about how to find users but provide a more general (but also more irritating) configuration for finding group information [5].

Another complexity of LDAP in practice is authentication. A last important LDAP verb is BIND, BIND is used to assume the identity of a user in the directory. While anonymous access to LDAP is common, modern directory servers implement access control and limit access to sensitive values like password hashes to the users they belong to, for obvious reasons. This means that the formerly common approach of anonymously querying for a user to get their password hash and then checking the password should never be seen or heard of today. Instead, user authentication is done via BIND: the LDAP client attempts to BIND to the user (as an LDAP object) using the password provided by the user. If the server allows it, the user apparently provided the correct password. If the server doesn't allow it, the user better try again. In this way, the actual authentication method is the authentication method of the LDAP server itself [6].

There's a problem, though. Or rather, two. First, for security reasons, it's not necessarily a great idea to allow users to query for complete group information, and depending on how group membership is represented it is not necessarily practical to use access controls to allow a user to access only the group information they should know about. Second, applications often have a need to access directory information at points other than when a user is actively logging in and the application has access to their password. For obvious reasons it is not a good idea for the application to store the user's password in plaintext for this purpose.

The solution is an irritating invention usually called a "manager." The manager is a non-person account (also called a system account) that an LDAP client uses in order to BIND to the LDAP server so that it is permitted to read information that is not available for anonymous query. Most commonly this is used for getting a user's group memberships. This is a particularly common setup because a lot of applications need access to user group information fairly frequently and do not strongly abstract their user information access, so they "cache" group information and update it from the LDAP server periodically---outside of the context of an authenticating user.

Very frequently this takes the form of periodically "synchronizing" the application's existing local user database with the LDAP server, a lazy bit of engineering that causes endless frustration for administrators but is also difficult to avoid as the reality is that the concepts of "user" and "group" simply vary far too widely between applications to completely centralize all user information in one place.

As mentioned earlier, all of the methods of authenticating against LDAP have appreciable limitations. For this reason, Kerberos is generally considered the superior authentication method and "real" LDAP authentication is not common at the OS level. That said, Kerberos configuration and clients are relatively complex, which is probably the main reason that many non-OS applications still use direct LDAP authentication.

In practice, directory servers are not usually set up as a standalone package. Usually they are one facet of a larger directory system or identity management system. Popular options are Microsoft Active Directory and Red Hat IDM (based on FreeIPA), but there are a number of other options out there. Each of these generally implement a directory service alongside a dedicated authentication service (usually Kerberos because it is powerful and well researched), a name service (DNS), and some type of policy engine. DNS might initially be surprising here, as it does not at first glance seem like a related concern. However, in practice, directory systems represent device just as much as people. Because each host needs to have a corresponding directory entry (particularly important with Kerberos where hosts need the ability to authenticate to other network services on their own), it's already necessary to maintain host information in the directory service which makes it a natural place to implement DNS. DHCP is also sometimes implemented as part of the directory service because there is overlap between the directory management functions and basic host management functions of DHCP, but this seems to be less common today because in enterprise orgs DHCP is more often part of an IPAM solution (e.g. Infoblox).

You might be surprised to hear that there are all of these inconsistencies and differences in LDAP implementations considering my claim that X.500 is strongly typed against schemas. The nature of this contradiction will be obvious to any DBA: for any non-trivial application, the schema will always be both too complex and not complex enough. The well-established X.500 and LDAP schemas, published for example in RFCs, don't have enough fields to express the full scope of information about users needed in any given application. Simultaneously, though, they provide so many types and attributes that there are multiple ways to solve a given problem. Any attempt to reduce one problem will inevitably make the other worse.

The long history of these systems only makes the problem more complicated, as there are multiple and sometimes conflicting historic schemas and approaches and it's hard to get rid of any of them now. For this reason identity management solutions often come with some sort of "quick ref" documentation explaining the important aspects of the LDAP schema as they use it, to be used as an aid in configuring other LDAP clients.

I'm going to call this enough on the topic of LDAP for now... but there will be a followup coming. For me, this whole discussion of complex enterprise directory solutions raises a question: can we have the advantages of a directory service, namely a unified sense of identity, in a consumer environment?

The answer is yes, through the transformation of all software into a monthly subscription, but I want to talk a bit about the history of attempts at bringing the dream of the NOS to the home. Microsoft has tried at least a half dozen times and it has never really worked.

[1] As an example of this ontological complexity, Microsoft Active Directory is sometimes referred to as being an LDAP server or LDAP implementation. This is not true, but it's also not untrue. It is perhaps more accurate to say that "Active Directory is an implementation of a modified form of X.500 which is commonly accessed using LDAP for interoperability" but that's a mouthful and probably still not quite correct.

[2] Have I written about this here before? While IANA was long operated by Jon Postel who was famously benevolent, the function of ICANN was tossed around defense contractors for a while and then handed to Network Solutions, who turned out to be so comically evil that the power had to be taken away from them. ICANN didn't turn out much better. It's a whole story.

[3] Requisite explanatory footnote about network operating systems (NOS): the term has basically changed in definition midway through computer history. Today NOS generally refers to operating systems written for network appliances, like Cisco IOS. Up to the mid-'90s, though, it more commonly referred to a general-purpose operating system that was built specifically to be used as part of a network environment, such as Novell Netware. The salient features of NOS such as centralized user directories, inter-computer messaging, and shared access to storage and printers are present in all modern operating systems (sometimes with implementations borrowed from historic NOS) and so the use of the term NOS in this sense has faded away.

[4] This whole thing gets into some weird UNIX history, particularly the gecos and the aspect of LDAP's UNIX-nerd cousin NIS. Maybe that'll be a post some time.

[5] For how closely connected the concept of users and groups seems to be, this issue of the user->group query being irritatingly difficult is remarkably common in identity systems, even many modern "cloud" ones. Despite being a common requirement and one of the conceptually simpler options for authorization RBAC does not generally seem to be a first-class concern to the designers of directories.

[6] It's possible to use a wide variety of network services for authentication in this way, by just passing the user's credentials on and seeing if it works. I have seen a couple of web applications offer "IMAP authentication" in that way, presumably because small organizations are more likely to have central email than LDAP.

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>>> 2021-05-01 simple as in snmp

Very early on in my career as an "IT person," when my daily work consisted primarily of photocopier and laptop warranty service with a smattering of Active Directory administration (it was an, uh, weird job), I was particularly intimidated by SNMP. It always felt like one of those dark mysteries of computing that existed far beyond my mortal knowledge, like distributed algorithm optimization or modern JavaScript.

The good news is that SNMP is actually, as the name suggests, quite simple. The reason for my SNMP apprehensions is a bit silly from the perspective of computer science: SNMP makes extensive use of long, incomprehensible numbers. That is, of course, basically a description of all of computing, but SNMP exposes them to users in a way that modern software generally tries to avoid.

Today, we're going to learn about SNMP and those numbers. Surprise: they're an emanation of an arcane component of the OSI stack, like at least 50% of the things I talk about.

But let's step back and just talk about SNMP at a high level. SNMP was designed to offer a portable and simple to implement method for a manager (e.g. an appliance or administrator's workstation) to inspect the state of various devices and potentially change their configuration. It's intended to be amenable to implementation on embedded systems, and while it's most classically associated with network appliances there is a virtually unlimited number of devices and software packages which expose an SNMP interface.

SNMP often acts as a "lowest common denominator:" it's a simple and old protocol, so just about everything supports it. This makes it very handy for getting heterogeneous devices (especially in terms of vendor) into one monitoring solution, and sometimes allows for centralized configuration as well, although that gets a lot trickier.

At its core, SNMP belongs to a category of protocols which I refer to as remote memory access protocols (this is my taxonomy and does not necessarily reflect that of academic work or your employer). These are protocols which allow a remote host to read and (possibly subject to access controls) write an emulated memory address space. This does not necessarily (and often doesn't) have anything to do with the actual physical or virtual memory of the service, and the addressing scheme used for this memory space might be eccentric, but the basic idea is there: the "server" has memory addresses, and the protocol allows you to read and write them.

These remote memory access protocols, as a category, tend to be very common with embedded systems because if they do happen to align with physical memory, they are very simple to implement. A prominent example is Modbus, a common industrial automation protocol that consists of reading and writing registers, coils, etc., which are domain-specific terms for addresses in the typed memory of PLCs (historically these were physical addresses in the PLC's unusually structured memory, but today it's generally just a software construct running on a more general-purpose architecture).

Unsurprisingly, then, the basic SNMP "verbs" are get and set, and these take parameters of an address and, if setting, a value. On top of this very simple principle, SNMP adds a more sophisticated feature called a "trap," but we'll talk about that later. Let's call it an "advanced topic," although it's actually one of the most useful parts of SNMP in practical situations.

What is perhaps most interesting to consider, as far as arcane details of SNMP, is the structure of the addresses. This is the scary part of SNMP: just about the first time you have to interact directly with SNMP you will encounter an address, called a variable or more properly object identifier (OID) in SNMP parlance, like .1.3.6.1.4.1.140.305. It's like an IP address, if they were substantially less user-friendly. That is to say, an IPv6 address [1].

These OIDs are in fact hierarchical addresses in a structure called the Management Information Base (MIB). The MIB is an attempt to unify, into one data structure, the many data points which could exist across devices in a network. This idea of a grand unification of the domain of knowledge of "configuration of network appliances" into one unpleasant numbered hierarchy has a powerful smell of golden era Computer Science with a capital CS, and indeed it is!

You see, from a very high level, the MIB is actually viewed as something akin to a serialization format---it is, after all, fundamentally concerned with packing the state of a device (Management Information) into a normalized, strictly structured, interoperable format. To achieve this, the MIB is described using something called SMI (e.g. RFC2578), which is best understood as a simplified (or perhaps more formally "constrained") flavor or ASN.1.

ASN.1 is the most prominent of the interface description and serialization formats developed for the OSI protocol suite. You might be tempted to call ASN.1 an example of the "presentation layer," although like most invocations of the OSI model, you would be misunderstanding the OSI model in saying so (the OSI presentation layer protocols are, as the name suggests but is often ignored, full on request-reply network protocols, not just serialization formats). Nonetheless, people say this a lot, and at least ASN.1 truly dates back to OSI, unlike a lot of things people relate to the OSI model.

You might be familiar with ASN.1 because it is widely used in cryptography, and by this I mean that cryptography applications are widely saddled with ASN.1. Most cryptographic certificates, the formats we tend to variously (and confusingly) call X.500, PKCS#11, DER, PEM, etc, are ASN.1 serialized. This is a whole lot of fun since ASN.1 is significantly divergent from modern computing conventions, including the use of length-prefixed rather than terminated strings (in some cases). I bring this up because it has lead to a rather famous series of vulnerabilities in TLS implementations, because apparently not even the people implementing TLS have actually read the ASN.1 specification that closely.

Anyway, back to SMI. Basically, SMI allows vendors of devices (or anyone really) to write, in SMI, a description of an MIB "module." A "module" is basically a list of OIDs (hierarchically structured) with their types and other metadata. This SMI source is then compiled into the binary representation actually used by SNMP clients. If you are unlucky, you may need to write SMI yourself for devices whose vendors implemented SNMP but did not provide the supporting materials. But, in most cases, device vendors provide a file (commonly called an MIB file) which is the SMI description of the MIB module(s) implemented by the device. This MIB file can then be fed to your SNMP tool to be compiled into its "whole picture" binary MIB.

Knowing that it is a result of compiling together SMI produces by various vendors, let's take a look at the structure of the MIB. Each dot-separated number identifies a subtree, which for extra fun are called "arcs" in the context of the MIB. At the very top of the OID hierarchy is a top level which identifies the standards authority. This is 0, 1, or 2, which refer to ITU, ISO, and ITU/ISO together, respectively. Of course these three parts of the tree use different internal structures so I can't generalize past this point, but I will focus on the ISO tree because it's the one most commonly used in practice.

Under the .1 ISO hierarchy are arcs for ISO standard OIDs, registry authorities (somewhat difficult to explain and also not widely used, basically a metadata space), ISO member organizations by country (e.g. ANSI in the US), and then identified organizations, which are just companies and organizations that have asked for OID space. This can be somewhat confusing because many national ISO member organizations also allocate OID space within their arcs, but major vendors (e.g. Cisco) are often found at this top level instead.

So let's take a look at a somewhat arbitrary example, an MIB for Juniper's Junos. I'm using this as an example rather than the more obvious Cisco IOS because I got mad at Cisco's website for getting MIBs which did not appear to have seen an update in a decade. In any case, the MIB starts out at .1.3.6.1.4.1.2636.

In terms of the hierarchy this means: ISO standard, identified organization, DOD, internet, private projects, private enterprises, Juniper.

Haha, wait, that just goes against most of what I said. What's going on with the DOD thing?

The entire Internet, big-I, TCP/IP world is considered to be a subset of the DOD, for OID purposes. This .1.3.6.1.4.1 space is actually managed by IANA, and if you would like your own .1.3.6.1.4.1 number they will be happy to give you one upon application.

This is all particularly interesting historically, because unlike a lot of protocols I talk about SNMP does not predate IP. It was designed specifically for use on IP networks, over UDP. SNMP is based on several earlier protocols also used with IP. So, where does this weird rendition of IP to a small subset come from?

Well, it really has more to do with politics than technology. The MIB tree essentially belongs to ITU and ISO, but ITU and ISO are both organizations which are not especially known for swiftly and cheaply adopting standards proposed by vendors. It was fairly obvious from an early stage that vendors would need to produce MIB modules for their own devices fairly quickly, but ISO and ISO member organizations were not especially enthusiastic about issuing a large number of arcs to these vendors. So instead, IANA stepped in---but not quite IANA yet, instead IANA's predecessor, Jon Postel. Postel, who was the IANA for quite some time, worked on contract for DOD, and so he assigned OIDs out of their space. There's no really good reason for it to be this way, but if you work with SNMP a lot then typing .1.3.6.1.4.1 will have become basically reflex.

Now, what is found inside of this Juniper space? Well, for example, there's .1.3.6.1.4.1.2636.3.58.1.2.4.1.3. This is an integer value which provides the average power used, in watts, by whatever's plugged into a particular outlet of a managed PDU. The MIB structure allows OIDs which contain other OIDs (object identifier type OIDs) to actually contain tables of those OIDs, so .1.3.6.1.4.1.2636.3.58.1.2.4 is a table of all of the outlets on the PDU, and .1.3.6.1.4.1.2636.3.58.1.2.4.1 within it is a list of useful properties of the outlet such as name, status, and various useful electrical measurements like current and power factor.

After all of this talk of ASN.1 and MIBs and etc, these examples are actually very useful and concrete. SNMP is, after all, actually a useful protocol for real-world situations, such as centralized monitoring of your PDUs to identify problems and catch your colo customers exceeding their power budgets.

And remember, SNMP even allows writing. So .1.3.6.1.4.1.2636.3.58.1.2.4.1.8, the status of the outlet, can not only be used to determine whether the outlet is on or off but also to turn the outlet on or off, which is a fun move when your colo customer doesn't pay their bill for months.

SNMP is not limited to as concrete of devices as managed PDUs. For example, RFC4113 provides an MIB for UDP. That is, it permits you to describe and modify UDP messages using SNMP, if that's a thing you really want to do. In fact, the entire concept of the MIB is far more general than SNMP, and ISO protocols and standards often use MIB OIDs for identification purposes having little to do with the application we're discussing here. For example, many MIME types have an associated OID because the OSI email equivalent, X.435, uses OIDs to identify the types of message parts. In general, OSI standards are lousy with OIDs used as identifiers and, less frequently, to describe data structures and field sets.

The fact that you can set via SNMP, and get all kinds of potentially sensitive questions, raises the concern of security. Fortunately, SNMP provides an airtight solution to this problem: "communities." A community is really just a shared password, if the SNMP manager has the same community string as the SNMP agent then it is allowed access. Even better, many SNMP agents have well-known default community strings. Perfect. To be fair, SNMPv3 adds a more rigorous authentication support including support for different authentication methods, but there are still plenty of SNMPv2 devices out there with community string set to "public."

One final thing to complete our discussion of SNMP is to mention the trap. More technically, I am going to conflate traps and inform requests which are actually slightly different, but everyone conflates them so I feel okay about it. A trap is an extremely useful feature of SNMP which allows you to configure an agent (e.g. device) to immediately inform a manager when certain events occur. This is essentially a basic alarm capability built in to many devices. Traps are identified by OIDs, and can bind other OIDs, so that the generated trap message includes not only which trap was triggered, but also some other related data if so configured. To be complete, an inform request is really just a trap where the agent acknowledges receipt (this is not the case with normal traps) so that the agent can resend if it is not acknowledged.

In order for traps to work, the manager first needs to listen for traps, which is usually fairly straightforward to set up. Then, various OIDs are set on the agent to enable traps and set the destination for those traps (e.g. the IP of the manager). In some cases agents also provide a web interface or other more convenient mechanisms to set these up, which is much appreciated since SNMP is unpleasant to have to think about directly.

That's about it for SNMP. Simple, right? Well, it really is pretty simple, as long as you agree to just take OIDs as magic numbers that come from wherever it is computers do and not ask too many questions. Where SNMP can become rather rough is when you run into issues with MIBs, or if you are using SNMPv3 where the authentication and configuration can be amazingly, maddeningly complex for some vendors.

As an aside, the whole reason I'm talking about SNMP is because a reader asked me to. For much the same reason, from the same reader, I'll be talking about LDAP soon. LDAP is even more an out-of-place artifact of OSI than SNMP, and it is basically impossible to describe as used in short form, but I will take a shot at illustrating the odd historical components of LDAP and the ways they matter today. It will at least serve as a teaser for my yet to be written book, "Survival Under LDAP." LDAP is survivable for as many as 70% of Americans, but you must know how to protect yourself!

[1] I continue to seriously question the merits of the complex address representation used with IPv6. If we had stuck to decimalized bytes separated by dots, we'd be doing a lot more typing, but we wouldn't be trying to remember what :: means when it's there.

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>>> 2021-04-26 iPaws

Programming notes:

Where we left off, the Emergency Alert System (EAS) had been "replaced," at least in name, by IPAWS: the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. In fact, it's more accurate to say that EAS is now just one component of IPAWS, and the task of originating alerts (and much of the bureaucracy) now rests on IPAWS.

IPAWS was particularly motivated by Hurricane Katrina, as this large-scale disaster had made it apparent how limited the existing emergency alert infrastructure was. A large portion of people do not receive EAS alerts because they are not listening to the radio or watching television. There are other avenues that exist to deliver alert information but the infrastructure was not in place to get alerts into these channels.

So, IPAWS took the fragmented landscape of miscellaneous government communications options and combined them into one beautiful, happy family that works together in flawless harmony. Let's just pretend.

There are several major components of IPAWS which had existed, at least in some form, prior to IPAWS but had not been unified into one network. These were EAS, NAWAS, WEA, and NOAA Weather Radio. More ambitiously, IPAWS is intended to be easily extensible to include other government and non-government alerting systems, but first, let's talk about the core.

NAWAS

The EAS we have already discussed. Another emergency communications system which dates back to the Cold War is NAWAS, the National Warning System. Wikipedia asserts that NAWAS was established in 1978, but this can't be correct as it's described in an AT&T standard a full decade earlier as an already existing system, with much the same capabilities it has today. 1978 may have been a significant overhaul of the system; it's hard to figure out a whole lot about NAWAS as it had historically been classified and today is obscure [1].

NAWAS serves the purpose of alerting, and more general communications, between government authorities. It is essentially a system of four-wire [3] leased telephone lines that links FEMA and other federal locations with state emergency authorities. Within states, there is typically a subsidiary NAWAS network for which the state authority acts as control and local authorities are connected as users.

An older operating manual for NAWAS has become public and you can read a great deal about it there, but the basic concept is that it functions as an intercom system over which federal centers such as NORAD or the National Weather Service can read voice messages, which will be heard in all state emergency operations centers. This provides a very rapid way of spreading basic information on a national emergency, and NAWAS is both a descendant and component of systems intended to trigger air raid sirens as quickly as possible after a NORAD alert (more about siren control will likely be a future topic).

Although NAWAS has seen technical improvement in the equipment, it still functions more or less the exact same way it did decades ago, and operating procedures are very simple. If you have ever used a good-quality, multi-station commercial intercom system with a visual alert feature, such as is often used in the theater industry for cues, you would find NAWAS unsurprising... except that the stations span thousands of miles.

NAWAS functions primarily as a party line intercom, but it does support dialing between stations to alert a specific location to start listening. Dialing is based on FIPS codes, and while that's not too strange of a choice from a federal system in general, it's probably not a coincidence that NAWAS stations are alerted using a similar numbering scheme to SAME headers... typically a station like the NWS would be issuing EAS messages and calling state EOCs to advise of the possible damage simultaneously.

WEA

The next core component of IPAWS in arbitrary Wikipedia ordering is WEA, the Wireless Emergency Alert system. WEA is a long-in-development partnership between the FCC and mobile carriers that ("partnership" in that participation is now mandatory) which allows short, textual emergency alerts to be sent to mobile phones throughout a region. This relies in a component of the 3GPP protocol stack that is not widely used (or really used at all) in the US, which essentially allows a cellular tower to send a true "broadcast" message which will be handled by every phone associated with that cell. In this way, addressing is roughly geographical rather than based on station identities.

These broadcast messages trigger special handling in the cell phone operating system, which generally feels a bit awkward and roughly implemented. Typically the old EBS Attention Tone is used as an audible alert and the message is displayed immediately over other applications.

Use of WEA has traditionally been rather heavily restricted, in practice to presidential alerts (e.g. the test conducted some years ago) and AMBER alerts. One might think that there's sort of an odd disparity in severity, between essentially "nuclear attack" and "child abducted somewhere in the same state," and indeed it is a major criticism of the AMBER alert system that emotionally- motivated handling of AMBER alerts as top-priority induces alarm fatigue that may lead to people ignoring or downplaying an actual nationwide civil emergency. If you own a cell phone and live in a state that participates in AMBER alerts you're probably inclined to agree, or maybe our child abduction rates here in the land of enchantment are just substantially elevated.

Weather Radio

The final major component is NOAA Weather Radio, more properly called NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards and often referred to as NOAA All Hazards Radio. This last one, which makes the most sense, is of course unofficial. A great many US residents are amazingly unaware of the NOAA Weather Radio infrastructure, which has been steadily expanded to substantial nationwide coverage. Weather Radio normally transmits a computer-synthesized voice describing the current weather and upcoming forecast, on one of a list of VHF frequencies around 162MHz. The full forecast generally repeats every fifteen minutes. This loop, updated regularly, is occasionally supplemented by outlook statements and other special material.

When the NWS issues a weather warning or alert, however, Weather Radio stations immediately play the alert with SAME headers and footers... much the same as EAS. Special-purpose radio receivers, popular in tornado-prone regions, parse the SAME headers and sound an audible alarm when an alert is issued for the correct region. In fact, the SAME protocol was originally designed for this purpose and was adopted for EAS after its widespread use for Weather Radio.

The relationship between Weather Radio and EAS is substantial. Since the development of EAS, Weather Radio stations now transmit all EAS alerts, not just those issued by the NWS. This is why "All Hazards" was awkwardly appended to the name: it functions as a general purpose emergency radio network, complete with a ready supply of specialized alarm receivers. In a way it is the NEAR concept deployed more successfully, but... well, success is relative. Weather radio receivers are uncommon nationally, despite their low cost [2].

So these are the four basic channels of IPAWS: broadcast radio and television, inter-agency telephone, cellular phones, and the dedicated radio network. IPAWS allows an alert to be simultaneously, and quickly, issued to all of these services. This is particularly important because WEA alerts, although they are length constrained, can encourage people in affected areas to turn on a radio to receive more extensive information via EAS.

IPAWS-OPEN

All of that said, the full scope of IPAWS is considerably more ambitious, which leads to IPAWS-OPEN. IPAWS-OPEN often gets rather grand descriptions as an enterprise, machine learning, blockchain artificial intelligence, but I'm here to cut through the bullshit: it's just a set of servers that broker XML documents.

Specifically, those XML documents are the Common Alerting Protocol, or CAP. CAP is essentially the same concept as SAME but in XML form rather than FSK, and including extensive capabilities to provide multiple representations of an alert, intended for different languages and media. CAP supports encryption and signing, which provides an authentication mechanism as well.

IPAWS-OPEN consists of servers which receive CAP documents and then distribute them onwards. That's basically it, but it is designed to allow for flexible expansion of IPAWS as a wide variety of alerting media can simply participate in the IPAWS-OPEN network. For example, a state DOT's changeable message highway signs could repeat alerts automatically if the control system's vendor implemented an IPAWS-OPEN client.

Although IPAWS, in theory, fully integrates all alerting channels, this obviously has not worked out in practice. Many agencies still operate fundamentally different alerting systems, most notably the NWS which has an old and extensive one, and so various sets of gateways, converters, and sometimes manual processes are required for a message to cascade from IPAWS-OPEN to all alerting channels. That said, in theory IPAWS will complete the EAS vision of flexible origination and targeting. A state governor, for example, can take full advantage of federal systems to deliver an emergency message to their state by using a CAP origination tool to send the message into IPAWS-OPEN.

Public and private organizations are able to access IPAWS-OPEN either through authority of a government agency or via a "public" (after extensive paperwork) data feed. This can be used to put alerting wherever you want; the government has somewhat comically pursued an internet-based alerting system, for example, for well over a decade without any real progress made. There seems to have been a somewhat fundamental misunderstanding of the way the internet is used, as government officials have often imagined an internet alerting capability as looking exactly like EAS on television stations---that is, the worst popup ever. What the infrastructure to deliver that would look like has remained mysterious, although perennial proposals have ranged from silly to alarming.

That said, Windows tray icon tools to pop up IPAWS alerts are out there, digital signage vendors offer the capability to automatically display alerts, and Google has tossed IPAWS into the Google Now pile. There is some progress, but it is uneven and not often seen in the real world.

the future

For reasons that are partly political and partly historical (that then turned into political), the United States has surprisingly weak infrastructure for the distribution of emergency information when compared to other developed nations. Much of this is a simple result of the lack of a state-owned broadcasting authority that operates domestic media. All national communications necessarily pass through the complex network of commercial journalism; while this may have ideological advantages it is not especially fast or reliable.

The trouble is that, in a way, any centralized, federally-operated system of delivering information to a large portion of the citizenry would be perceived as---and probably be---an instrument of propaganda, in violation of long-held American principles. For this reason, it seems likely that we will always have a fragmented and seldom-used alerting infrastructure.

On the other hand, much of the modern state---primarily the ridiculous effort over years taken to deploy WEA---is a result of systematic underfunding and deprioritization of civil defense in the United States. For the nation with the world's greatest defense budget and a very high, although not first-place, military budget as portion of GDP, civil defense has always been an afterthought. Our preparedness against emergency---whether natural, civil, or warfare---has routinely been judged less important than offensive capability.

During the Cold War, this was a cause of a surprising amount of strife even within the military. Robert McNamera, Secretary of Defense during the key period of the 1960s, routinely objected to investment in missile and even missile defense systems rather than fallout shelters and relocation preparations. Today, absent the specter of the Soviet Union's sausage ICBMs, there is less interest in civil defense as a military strategy than ever before.

Instead, most modern civil defense efforts are motivated by the political embarassment subsequent to a series of hurricanes, most notably Katrina. Unfortunately, public and political reaction to these events tends to end up down very strange rabbit holes and has seldom lead to serious, systematic review of civil defense capabilities. What political will has come about is repeatedly captured by the defense industrial complex and transformed into yet another acquisition project that costs billions and delivers next to nothing.

What I'm saying is that nothing is likely to change. A single successful national presidential alert will continue to be regarded as a major achievement, and the most capabile, reliable technology will continue to be mild evolutions of systems developed prior to 1980.

All of this pessimism aside, next time I return to the topic of civil defense I would like to look at its most pessimistic aspect---the part that McNamera believed to be worth the money. We'll learn about the Federal Relocation Arc and the National Relocation Program. Naturally with a focus on telecom.

[1] An obviously interesting question is "what came before NAWAS?" It's hard to say, and very likely there is no one answer, as the Civil Defense Administration, DOD, and various state and regional authorities had all stood up various private-line telephone networks. This includes federal initiatives such as the "lights and bells" warning system by AT&T which are fairly well documented, but also a lot of things only vaguely referred to by historians who seem to actually know very little about the context. Case in point, this piece from the Kansas Historical Society which repeats the myth of the Washington-Moscow hotline as a red phone while giving no useful information about the artifact. It appears very much like an early 1A2 key system instrument, and the pre-911 emergency number sticker strongly suggests it was just used with the plain-old telephone system. At the time, a red handset was commonly used to indicate a "hotline" in the older sense of the term, that is, a no-dial point-to-point link. This wasn't a feature of the 1A2 system but 1A2 did offer an intercom feature that this phone may have been left connected to.

[2] In a four-wire telephone line, audio in and out (microphone and speaker) are carried on separate pairs. This is generally superior and has long been used within telephone exchanges and long-distance lines, because the "hybrid" transformer which allows for both functions on one pair is a source of distortion and is prone to issues with echos and signal path loops. Moreover, it inevitably mixes the audio each way. On a typical telephone this just leads to "sidetone" which is now considered a desirable property, but for an intercom system with many stations simultaneously active it becomes a tremendous problem as not just the signal but its poorer-quality "echo" from each hybrid transformer ends up being amplified. Two-wire lines are generally run to homes and businesses simply due to the lower materials cost, but for "large-area intercom" systems such as NAWAS, four-wire connections are used. Really the whole thing is somewhat technical and requires some EE, but in general four-wire private lines tend to be used for either very quality-critical applications (e.g. between radio studios) or intercom/squawk box installations (e.g. between control rooms). Obviously intercom over private line is not very common due to the high cost, but emergency operations are a common application. This whole issue of two-wire vs. four-wire telephone connections becomes extremely important in the broadcasting industry, where "hybrid" has its own specific meaning to refer to a sort of "un-hybrid" transformer which separates the inbound and outbound audio again to help isolate the voice of the host from returning via the inbound telephone path. Of course doing this by simple electrical means never works perfectly, and modern broadcast hybrids employ DSP methods to further reduce the problem. This is all another reason that ISDN telephones have found an enduring niche in radio journalism.

[3] Weather alerts aren't always a matter of life and death but sometimes more simply practical. I've twice had cars damaged by the severe hail storms we are prone to, and prompt attention to a severe thunderstorm alert gives an opportunity to move cars under cover. Considering the cost of bodywork the Weather Radio receiver can pay for itself very quickly.

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>>> 2021-04-23 this is a test of the computer.rip alert system

A little while ago I talked about CONELRAD, and how its active denial component was essentially too complex to actually be implemented, so it was reduced to only serving as an emergency broadcasting system. This is not to say that CONELRAD was a failure, or at least not entirely. CONELRAD is the direct ancestor of today's Emergency Alert System, which does serve an important and useful role.

Like most government initiatives, though, it is tremendously complex and has had a very rocky path to its present capability. Let's take a look at the post- CONELRAD history of emergency broadcasting in the US, and how it works today.

It was not always obvious that radio was the best way to disseminate emergency information. It had two main shortcomings: first, there were tactical disadvantages to operating radio stations during a military emergency [1]. Second, receiving an alert by radio required that there be a radio turned on somewhere nearby. This was not at all guaranteed, and in a case where minutes mattered presented a significant problem.

"Minutes", after all, was generous. Military and Civil Defense officials prominently demanded an alerting timeline (from origination to the entire public) of just thirty seconds.

alternatives to radio

Two major alternate emergency warning strategies have existed to overcome these downsides of radio: First, sirens. Sirens require no special equipment or preparation to receive and so are an ideal wide-area alerting system, but they were very expensive to maintain in the civil defense administration era (in especially more sparsely populated areas, some sirens were even driven by diesel engines... you can imagine the maintenance headaches). As a result, while many larger towns and cities had siren systems at the peak of the Cold War, today wide-area siren systems are uncommon outside of regions prone to tornadoes, and more recently, parts of the West Coast due to tsunami hazard [2].

The second strategy is a wired system. We have previously talked about wired radio in the context of public broadcasting. A very limited wired broadcast system was proposed for the US, called the National Emergency Alarm Repeater or NEAR. NEAR consisted of a small box plugged into an outlet. In the case of an emergency, an extra 270Hz tone was modulated onto the normal 60Hz AC power lines, which would cause the NEAR 'repeaters' to sound a buzzer.

That's it. Not much of a broadcast system, really, but rather a supplement to sirens that would allow coverage in rural areas and ensure that they were clearly audible indoors [3].

Although NEAR reached an early implementation stage, with testing in small areas and manufacturing of repeaters underway, it was never deployed at large scale. Radio emergency broadcasting was viewed as superior, mainly because of the ability to deliver instructions. The problem of radio broadcasting not reaching the many individuals who were not presently listening to the radio is, to be honest, one that was never meaningfully addressed until the last few years. But I am getting ahead of myself.

the Emergency Broadcasting System

In 1963, the Emergency Action Notification System (EANS) was activated. EANS is almost exclusively referred to by its later name, the Emergency Broadcast System, but it's important to know that it was originally named EANS. In the context of the United States Government, "Emergency Action" has long been specifically a euphemism for nuclear war. Emergency action was first, and other types of emergency were added to the national alerting regime only later.

There is some ambiguity as to whether EBS was a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) system or a Civil Defense Administration (CD) system. The answer is some of both; the system was designed and operated by the FCC based on a requirement, and under authority, from CD. This ambiguity in emergency alert systems remains to this day, although the Civil Defense Administration has, through a very circuitous path, become a component of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). A good portion of the ongoing problems with these initiatives relates to this problem: the Federal Government has never done an adequate job of placing emergency alerting under a central authority, which has always lead to competing interests and resource contention.

That's a lot about the bureaucracy, but what about the Emergency Broadcasting System itself?

The EBS was organized into a tree-like structure. At the top were two "origination points," originally a primary and alternate but later equal. The identity of the origination points varied over the life of the system but were typically a relevant military center (Air Defense Command, CONAD, NORAD) and a relevant civilian center (CD, FEMA, and the many acronyms that came in between). We are talking, here, about physical locations---two of them. In the early '60s both the culture of national defense and the technology were not amenable to a substantially redundant system.

At the time, the two origination points were not intended to issue alerts on their own, but rather on the behalf of the President. So, in a way, there was one true origination point: the President, wherever they were, would issue the order, via the White House Communications Agency, to one of the origination points. This is one of the reasons (the more significant being reprisal itself) that the President, as they traveled, was always to be in real-time communication with the WHCA.

The origination points, upon receiving a bona fide order from the President, would retrieve a codebook and use a teletype network (dedicated to this purpose) to send the message and an authentication codeword to a number of major radio and television networks. The same message, called an Emergency Action Notification, was repeated onto the teletype networks of wire agencies such as the Associated Press for further distribution.

Upon receiving such a message an operator at each of these networks would tear open a red envelope issued to the networks quarterly and find the codeword for the day. If the codewords matched, nuclear attack was imminent.

Activation details from this point varied somewhat by network and technology, but in general these national media networks would initiate a corporate procedure to direct all of their member stations to switch their program audio (and video as relevant) to a leased line or radio link from the national control center. This process was at least partially automated so that it could be performed very quickly. These now live national networks would then broadcast an Attention Tone.

The Attention Tone used later on, a combination of 853 and 960 Hz, is still instantly recognizable by most Americans today. Although its purpose was, as we will see, mostly technical, it was intentionally made to be unpleasant and very distinctive so that listeners would associate it with the Emergency Broadcast System and start to pay attention. This worked so well that the same Activation Tone is still widely used by emergency alerting systems today (even as a ringtone for WEA on most smartphones), although changes in the technology have rendered it vestigial.

The Attention Tone was recognizable not just to humans, but to electronics. These national networks were only the first stage of the broadcast component of EBS. Radio and television stations not associated with one of these major national networks would have, at their control points, a dedicated receiver (often more than one) tuned to stations operated by national networks. This receiver's purpose was to recognize the Attention Tone and at least sound an alarm in the control room, and later on automatically switch program audio (and in some cases video) to the received station in order to simply repeat the message on.

In this way, the activation of the major national networks cascaded through the radio and television industry until every AM, FM, and OTA television station was broadcasting the same message.

The national networks were expected to broadcast pre-scripted messages until they received more specific instructions; a typical script went: "We interrupt this program. This is a national emergency. The President of the United States or his designated representative will appear shortly over the Emergency Broadcast System."

EBS was functional and, besides a one major gaffe involving an activation due to a mistake by an operator, encountered few serious problems. As a result it had a long life, remaining in service well into the computer age. The major limitation of EBS was its highly centralized structure: messages were to originate only with the President. This was a logistical challenge for alerts besides nuclear war, and prevented the use of the system to address major emergencies in smaller areas. The similarly named Emergency Alert System made use of similar technology, but more flexible policy, to address these shortcomings.

the Emergency Alert System

In 1997, the Emergency Alert System replaced EBS. Like EBS, EAS was a project of the FCC and FEMA, but added the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA's involvement, being the parent agency of the National Weather Service, was the foundation of EAS's larger scope: EAS was intended not only for military conflict but also for non-military civil emergencies such as severe weather [4].

Technologically, the EAS is largely similar to the EBS, but expanded use of digital signaling and a more flexible hierarchy that allows for messages to be distributed in a more flexible, targeted way.

When you think of the Attention Tone today, you probably think of it as accompanied by three buzzes. You can hear an example here. Those three buzzes, like the Attention Tone originally, are not intended for human consumption. They're actually brief FSK packets containing a digital message in the Specific Area Message Encoding, or SAME. As the name suggests, the main feature of SAME is that it contains a list of locations---expressed as FIPS state and county IDs---to which the alert applies. This allows the the dedicated receivers in "downstream" stations to intelligently decide whether or not the alert is applicable to the location they serve.

In addition, SAME headers include a code identifying the type of disaster, which can be used for a variety of purposes such as for tornado siren controllers to determine whether or not they should activate.

EAS also adds more flexible options for broadcast stations. The technical device used by stations to receive and inject EAS messages, called an ENDEC, is computerized and configurable. It can be combined with other equipment to allow some stations to inject only a brief message (which may be in the form of a text crawl over the normal program feed for television stations) directing listeners to a different station to receive more detailed information.

The biggest change in EAS, though, is the origination of messages. EAS messages enter the broadcast realm through Primary Entry Point radio stations, which are typically major network-operated radio stations with high transmit powers and modest hardening against attack and disaster. PEP stations are fitted with special equipment that can automatically receive an alert (and override the program feed to transmit it) through various methods, but originally through FNARS.

FNARS is the FEMA National Radio System, a network of HF radio stations (using the hybrid digital ALE protocol also used by the military) located at various emergency command points. The primary control station for FNARS is located at Mount Weather, FEMA's primary hardened bunker, and state OEMs and many better-equipped county and city OEMs are connected to FNARS either directly or through regional radio networks.

In modern applications, FNARS is complemented by IP delivery of messages, but that's getting in to a future topic.

This nationwide network that includes multiple organizations allows EAS messages to be originated by different Alerting Authorities at different scopes. The President still has the ability to issue EAS messages to the entire nation, but so can certain federal agencies and military centers under certain circumstances (e.g. NORAD). Importantly, though, alerts can be issued for entire states by the governor or a designee (such as a state director of emergency operations), or at the county or city level by a relevant executive or emergency operations official.

This makes EAS suitable for a wide variety of situations: not just nuclear attack, but civil unrest, severe weather, major transportation disasters, infrastructure emergencies (e.g. contaminated municipal water), etc.

By far the largest user of EAS is the National Weather Service, whose forecast offices routinely issue EAS alerts. While these types of weather alerts are usually associated with tornados, in my part of the country they more often relate to flash flooding, large hail, or particularly severe wind and lightning. The National Weather Service estimates that dozens of lives are routinely saved by timely warnings of imminent severe weather.

the internet age

In most meaningful senses, EAS remains in service today. However, in a technical sense of government funding, it has been replaced by something more ambitious. The reality is that the expectation that alertees have a radio turned on nearby has always been a problematic one, and broadcast radio and television are generally declining in popularity.

To achieve rapid alerting, alerts must now be disseminated through more channels than just broadcast stations. That's exactly the goal of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS. I've already gone on long enough, so let's talk about IPAWS next.

Teaser: there's even more radio involved!

[1] This because civilian radio stations could be used as navigation aids by enemy aircraft, helping them to locate major cities despite blackout. This concern became obsolete as air navigation technology improved.

[2] To some degree tsunamis are a retrospective explanation, the state of Hawaii and the city of San Francisco have maintained siren systems since the Cold War and only more recently began to discuss tsunamis as a purpose. Mostly they're still worried about "radiological attack," to quote the SF OEM.

[3] In Great Britain, a more complete wired broadcast system---including voice messages---called HANDEL was installed in various government buildings, but was not extended to homes or businesses. A rather accurate depiction of HANDEL is seen in the 1984 film Threads, and in this YouTube clip at 1:07 and again, in alert, at 2:17, but if you are interested in the topics of civil defense and nuclear war the entire film is required, albeit difficult, viewing.

[4] At the time war, civil unrest, and weather represented essentially the scope of the system. Earthquakes have only begun to fall into the scope of emergency alerting very recently, which is interesting because the earthquake scenario is actually much more challenging than nuclear attack: the potential for lifesaving through early warning is tremendous, but seismic methods of detecting earthquakes give warning only seconds before the destructive shaking starts. Although some parts of the US have had earthquake warning systems for a couple decades, they have seldom ever been backed by an alerting system capable of delivering the warning before it is pointless.

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