TELECOM Digest Fri, 22 Jul 94 15:05:30 CDT Volume 14 : Issue 330 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Announcement of Free Software: NAS Network Management System (Jude George) Book Review: "Broadband Networking ABCs for Managers" (Rob Slade) True Voice Re-Exam - Some Additional Comments (Dr. John Berryhill) Re: Camelot on the Moon (Charles Hoequist) Re: Reading the TELECOM Digest May Be a Crime (John Higdon) Re: Reading the TELECOM Digest May Be a Crime (Andrew C. Green) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and GEnie. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available at no charge to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: 9457-D Niles Center Road Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 708-329-0571 Fax: 708-329-0572 ** Article submission address only: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu ** Our archives are located at lcs.mit.edu and are available by using anonymous ftp. The archives can also be accessed using our email information service. For a copy of a helpful file explaining how to use the information service, just ask. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* Additionally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jude@nas.nasa.gov (Jude A. George) Subject: Announcement of Free Software: NAS Network Management System Organization: Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation, NASA Ames Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 10:01:33 GMT A free package called HNMS, the NAS Hierarchical Network Management System, is now available. The software may be ftp'd from ftp.netcom.com in the directory /ftp/pub/heyjude. (We're looking for other sites to pick this up, as netcom is pretty bogged down). Please read this full announcement before getting the software. Note: This software has not yet been ported to the Sparc, or tested on platforms other than the Iris. Although the code is written to be portable there are some minor System V dependencies and changes that would need to be made to the makefiles. A Sparc port will be available soon, courtesy of Jason Thorpe at Oregon State University. In it's current incarnation, HNMS also requires that you link with Motif libraries, which are not free software. We may remedy this at a later date with Motif-free GUIs (although we're hoping that someone beats us to it). HNMS v2.0g2 This is the first public release of HNMS, the NAS Hierarchical Network Management System. HNMS may be used to monitor status and generate traffic statistics for a large, routed IP network. Graphical displays are provided for the X11 Window System and make use of the Motif widget set. HNMS is unique is that it can be used to graphically display routing information. The GUI provides compact representations of LANs, in which the status of every subnet, host, and IP address can be displayed in a small area. Netmask misconfigurations can be picked out immediately. It also correctly displays various WAN architectures, such as those which include multiple IP addresses per interface (or vice versa), or subnets which spread across multiple links. A custom version of HNMS was used to generate the live, three-dimensional representation of the cross-country ATM network at Supercomputing '93 in Portland, Oregon. Data collection is handled via SNMP, ICMP, and direct layer 2 monitoring. Distribution of network management information is done via HNMP, a new protocol which builds upon the simple, stateless client-server model used by SNMP. HNMP defines network objects, binds SNMP variables to them, and facilitates higher level management operations on them. The ASN.1 specification of HNMP is included in this package. Please note that there is also a release of HNMS that we are distributing through COSMIC, NASA's software technology transfer organization. COSMIC may (or may not) provide support for that distribution, but please do not ask them for any kind of support concerning this one. They will not be able to help you. This version of HNMS has been made available to you, by special dispensation, as FREE SOFTWARE under the GNU public licence ("copyleft"). It is distributed as is, with NO WARRANTY for its fitness for any purpose, and is NON-PRODUCTION software. If it is redistributed, you may not charge for it or any derivative work. Please see the file "COPYING" for details about all this. Full source code is provided. We encourage the Internet community to experiment with, build upon, use, port, learn from, add modules to, write scripts for, and expand this software package. There are some areas in which it can be improved, especially in the areas of generality and efficiency. We would like to see standardized displays for various types of networks and monitored objects, as well as customized displays for specific network hardware, and have them be freely available to everyone. The authors do not have the resources to maintain this software outside of NAS. Although we may continue to add enhancements, we are hoping that other(s) will take on the role of incorporating bug fixes and extensions to the code, and sending out new releases. We do welcome any suggestions or bug reports that you may have -- but there's no guarantee that we will be able to help you, or even have time to respond. We are working full time (and then some) on other projects. To reach us via email, mail to hnmsdev@nas.nasa.gov. This software has not been extensively tested. Consider it to be NON-PRODUCTION code. There have been (and may still be) bugs which cause it to crash systems, run rampant on networks, or just annoy people. Neither the authors, nor NASA, nor anybody at all takes any responsibility for any damage that HNMS may cause, directly or indirectly, to your network, your users, or anything. That said, it works pretty well for us. Jude George Leslie Schlecht jude@nas.nasa.gov schlecht@nas.nasa.gov Any opinions expressed above are a figment of your imagination, and should not be taken to reflect the views of NAS, NASA, CSC, or anybody else. ----------- TO BUILD, follow the instructions in the top-level Makefile. ------> Be forewarned that you will need to obtain the Motif libraries, ------> ISODE-7.0 (not 8.0) and tcpdump if they do not already exist on your system. FOR COMPLETE INSTRUCTIONS on installing and using HNMS, please read the file docs.ps. Here are some quick-start instructions for the HNMS daemon, the graphical user interface, and the textual user interface. The binaries are called hnmsd, hnms, and hnmstool. INSTALLATION 1. Untar and build the HNMS distribution. Sources, docs, and auxiliary files are included. This version of HNMS has only been tested on the Silicon Graphics Iris under IRIX 4.0.5. It should work with little modification on SparcStations running SunOS 4.x. 1. Choose a directory to be the hnms "home", and copy the binaries and the background/ directory to that directory. 2. Set the $HNMS_HOME environment variable to be that directory. You may want to put this in your .login. 3. Make sure tcpdump is in your path. It's usually located in /usr/local/etc. The HNMS IO module uses tcpdump to discover new IP addresses. 4. Make the hnmsd (and tcpdump, if necessary) setuid root. The HNMS IO module, contained within hnmsd, needs root to access the ICMP socket. 5. Set the HNMS_PROMISCUOUS environment variable. We are just using this as a flag to tell the IO module that it's okay use promiscuous Ethernet monitoring. 6. Start hnmsd. RUNTIME -- GUI The GUI binary is called "hnms". If you are running it on a machine different from the server, set the HNMS_SERVER environment variable to have the server machine's name. Start the hnms program. Once the GUI's main window appears, choose "Open" from the "HNMP" menu at the top center of the window. A new window titled "Server" will pop up. In this window, type "public" in the Community field, and the hostname of the server machine in the Selection field. Then click the Connect button. At this point, you can start building diagrams. Choose "New --> Custom Status View" from the HNMS menu on the main window. An "EDIT" window will pop up. Type an asterisk in the Selection field, then click Add, then click the check mark at the top. You will see a display of all the hosts that the server currently knows about ("Processor" objects), along with their IP addresses ("Ipaddr" objects") and the subnets they are connected to ("Subnet objects). If you have just recently started up hnmsd, the objects will appear magenta while hnmsd is ramping up. This process takes three minutes. Afterwards they will change to green. When a reachable object becomes unreachable, it changes to yellow, then red. Feel free to experiment with the rest of the menu items. "Site" and "WAN" diagrams may be built in a manner similar to the "Custom". For WAN diagrams to be displayed properly, the sysLocation field of your hosts should be in the format . For example, "NASA Ames Research Center -122.5 37.1". RUNTIME -- PLAINTEXT You may also run hnmstool. This program takes commands on stdin and outputs results on stdout, so it can be used effectively from within shell scripts. For a demonstration, we will run it interactively. The hnmstool does not give a prompt. After starting it, wait a minute or two for it to get the list of HNMS objects from the server. for the HNMS daemon to pick up a good assortment of objects from the network. Then type list. You should see a list of objects scroll down the screen. Only hosts with SNMP agents responding to "public" will be shown. To pick up other hosts, type hint . For example: hint snafu.nas.nasa.gov foobar The next time you type list, you should see processor:snafu among the objects. To get data about an object, type subscribe "" @. For example: subscribe "processor:snafu" sysUpTime.0@15 This will give you a report of the value of the sysUpTime.0 variable every 15 seconds, if the variable changes. Since sysUpTime.0 constantly changes, you will get an update on stdout every 15 seconds. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 06:40:49 MDT From: Rob Slade Subject: "Broadband Networking ABCs for Managers" by Davidson BKBNABCM.RVW 940426 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 5353 Dundas Street West, 4th Floor Etobicoke, ON M9B 6H8 416-236-4433 fax: 416-236-4448 or 22 Worchester Road Rexdale, Ontario M9W 9Z9 800-263-1590 800-567-4797 fax: 800-565-6802 or 605 Third Avenue New York, NY 10158-0012 USA 800-CALL-WILEY 212-850-6630 Fax: 212-850-6799 Fax: 908-302-2300 jdemarra@jwiley.com aponnamm@jwiley.com "Broadband Networking ABCs for Managers", Davidson, 1994, 0-471-61954-X, U$29.95 With the continuing development of new computer and communications technologies, and the increasing rate of such development, it is difficult for professionals in the field to keep up, let alone managers and executives who must make the final decisions. This book is a welcome resume of some of the "hot" new data communications methods and standards. Chapters one to three are primarily concerned with the factors driving increased communications needs; more desktop power, group work, multimedia, mobile computing, and telecommuting of various types; and the benefits of improved networking. Chapters four and five give basic background information on LAN technologies, dealing, respectively, with local and internetworking functions. It is chapters six to eight that give hard information on the new technologies, such as frame relays, call relay, ATM (asynchronous transfer mode), and SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork). Data professionals will grasp explanations readily, seeing ATM, for example, as a form of "slotted ring" networking. Unfortunately, the material of the first five chapters is not a sufficient background to understand the technical implications of this central text. Managers and executives, unless former techies themselves, are not likely to understand the concepts without further help. The book continues with a more conceptual discussion of the internetworking of the technologies, in chapter nine, and a fairly terse glance at planning, in chapter ten. For those charged with communications planning for medium- to large-sized organizations, this book is a valuable reference to have on the technical planning bookshelf. Even if you cannot give it to the denizens of executive country, it will give you a clearer picture when you are called in to help them decide on these bright new communications technologies. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKBNABCM.RVW 940426. Distribution permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated publications/mailing lists. Vancouver ROBERTS@decus.ca Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca User p1@CyberStore.ca Security Canada V7K 2G6 ------------------------------ From: Dr. John Berryhill Subject: True Voice Re-Exam - Some Additional Comments Date: 22 Jul 1994 03:41:37 GMT Organization: little scraps of paper, mostly During the earlier discussion about True Voice, someone said, quite pointedly, that it is "not as simple as playing graphic equalizer with the telephone line." In fact, the ONLY specific pieces of equipment mentioned in the Bowker patent are a Yamaha DEQ-7 equalizer and a 4ESS toll switch. Go figure. To me, it sounds an awful lot like "playing graphic equalizer with the telephone line." Getting a Yamaha DEQ-7 equalizer to operate on time-division multiplexed companded PCM signals in a toll switch is left as an exercise for the reader. According to the folks at Yamaha, the DEQ-7 requires linear-encoded digital signals in a proprietary Yamaha format. As far as the "sophisticated digital signal processing techniques" that someone had mentioned in the earlier discussion, the Bowker patent says the following: "[C]oefficients of the digital filter are selected in a conventional manner to increase the level of speech signals occurring within a particular range of frequencies..." [column 3, lines 30-33] "Specifically, as is well-known, an echo canceler performs a number of signal processing functions." [column 4, line 62] "Digital filter 110-22 implements the inventive method in echo canceler 110-2. A similar circuit implements the invention in echo canceler 105-2. The way in which a digital filter is implemented is well-known and will not be discussed herein." [column 5, lines 29-33] Pretty sophisticated stuff. In the Reexamination Request, this is what is called "admitted prior art." Of course, if you had seen "Voice Frequency Transmission Treatment for Special Service Telephone Circuits" in Bell Syst. Tech. J., v60 n7, Sept. 1981, you would have already known that the well-known "number of signal processing functions" performed by an echo canceler include: "...(i) an equalizer for the transmit direction of transmission, (ii) an equalizer for the receive direction of transmission, and (iii) a canceler." [page 1590] The Bowker patent suggests using such an equalizer to compensate for the low-frequency roll-off of a standard telephone. As any EE knows, graphs of frequency response are often called Bode plots. In the classic Bell Labs paper on variable equalizers published by H.W. Bode in 1938, (Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. 17, no. 2), Dr. Bode had this to say on the subject: "The use of equalizing structures to compensate for the variation in the phase and attenuation characteristics of transmission lines and other pieces of apparatus is well known in the communication art." [page 229] "The network should then behave much like a radio 'tone control.'" [page 230] Quick quiz for the technically-impaired: Name one "other piece of apparatus", aside from a transmission line, that one might find in a telephone system? If you guessed "a telephone" then you qualify for the bonus round. If you didn't, then you need a quick refresher from Mr. G.J. Barnes, from the record of the 1979 National Telecommunications Conference: "The telephone is an integral part of the network and satisfactory conversational quality is usually only achieved when due account is taken of the characteristics of each of the communication links." [page 51.1.5] Among the five items of prior art that AT&T cited to the examiner during prosecution of the patent, in accordance with their duty to disclose relevant information known to them, was an anonymous article from _Hobby Electronics_ on how to build your own stereo bass booster. Another item related to car stereos. Only two of the five had anything to do with telephony. I understand that things may have been tough since divestiture, but they might want to trade their _Hobby Electronics_ subscription for the Bell System Technical Journal (since re-named). Surely they'd qualify for a TrueDiscount or something. For the severely technically-impaired, there is the charming 1934 book, intended for a popular audience, by Mr. J. Mills entitled _Signals and Speech in Electrical Communications_ (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), stating: "The test experiment is easily set up by one 'skilled in the art' as the patent lawyers would say. It requires telephone equipment; and in the line between the transmitter, which picks up the musical note, and the loud speaker, which delivers its mutilated remains to the observer, a set of adjustable electric filters, for those devices are selective in their transmission and will eliminate currents corresponding to undesired pitches. In fact, when once a sound wave has been anaesthetized by a transmitter and laid out on a pair of telephone wires, the most crucial of operations may be performed upon it. Its various components can be removed, amplified or rearranged." [pages 14-15] The most striking thing about this passage is Mr. Mills' ability to predict, exactly 60 years in advance, what patent lawyers would say. And, by the way, if you watch the end of the commercial closely, you will notice that Whitney Houston's mouth movements are out of synch with the soundtrack. John Berryhill 1601 Market St., Suite 720, Philadelphia PA 19103 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 14:55:00 GMT From: charles (c.a.) hoequist Subject: Re: Camelot on the Moon I, too, was thrilled watching the first moon landing (and the subsequent ones, for that matter), and I'd like to put some details on the Moderator's reminiscences that prefaced Don Kimberlin's article. PAT wrote > Even the talking heads of television news had nothing to say, so > shocking was the scene before all of us. Imagine nearly an hour of > dead air, just silence from the men and women who usually have plenty > to say ... they sat there as shocked as the rest of us. We stared at > a picture on a screen for nearly an hour without a word of sound as > the men Not on CBS, they weren't silent, though we probably all just tuned them out. I certainly did. I sat down yesterday, though, and listened to a tape I made live of the audio from the CBS broadcast. (frequently stopping the tape and just sitting, overwhelmed -- it hasn't lost any of its impact for me), and here is a transcription of the central event. Note the telecom glitch (inverted display) and the inability of the talking heads (the two Walters, Cronkite and Schirra) to just belt up for once and let history happen. -------------- transcription start ------------------ Apollo: Roger, tv circuit breaker's in [unintelligible] Houston: Roger. And we're getting a picture on the tv! Cronkite: There it is! Schirra: Oh, great! Apollo: You got a good picture, huh? Houston: There's a great deal of contrast in it, and currently it's upside-down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail. Cronkite: four hundred million people are turning on their heads at the moment, with those words. Uh, they're supposed to turn that picture over for us, electronically. Schirra: There's some motion there. Cronkite: There, they turned it over now. Schirra: There's a foot going down. Cronkite: There he is, there's a foot coming down the steps. Houston: Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now. Apollo: Okay, I just checked, getting back up to that first step. It's, not collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up. Houston: Roger, we copy. Apollo: It's a pretty good little jump. Cronkite: So there's a foot on the moon! Stepping down on the moon. If he's testing that first step, he must be stepping down on the moon at this point! Ten- Houston: Buzz, this is Houston. [Add? aft?] 2 1/160ths second for shadow photography on the sequence camera. Apollo: [Aldrin] Okay. [Armstrong] I'm uh, at the foot of the ladder. The LEM footpads are only, uh, depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be, uh, very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. [unintelligible] is very fine. Cronkite: Boy, look at those pictures. Wow! It's a little shadowy, but he said he expected that in the shadow of the lunar module. Armstrong is on the moon. Neil Armstrong, [Armstrong's voice in the background: "Okay, I'm gonna [unintelligible] off the LEM now" ] 38-year-old American, standing on the surface of the moon. On this July 20th, nineteen hundred and sixty-nine. [Armstrong has started talking under the word, 'nine': "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."] [ several seconds of dead air ] Schirra: I think that was Neil's quote. I didn't understand it. Cronkite: 'One small step for man', but I didn't get the second phrase. Someone of our monitors here, at space headquarters, was able to hear that, we'd like to know what it was. [Armstrong under: [unintelligble] The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boot."] Cronkite: His quote was, that's one small step for man, that's one giant leap for mankind [Armstrong under: unintelligible, due to Cronkite talking] ---------------- transcription end -------------- [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You kinda feel excited even reading about it ... Well, I hope the messages this past week on the 25th anniversary of the moon walk have been enjoyable to everyone. The action on Jupiter this past week has also been fascinating. At least in the case of Jupiter there have been others to observe what is going on. I wonder, when it happens here -- as it surely will some day -- if there will be anyone to mourn or miss us after we are gone, or anyone who even knows that it happened? At least we know it happened on Jupiter, even though there is not a thing we can do about it. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 00:45:31 -0700 From: john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon) Subject: Re: Reading the TELECOM Digest May Be a Crime > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This time around dear readers, I decided > to save the best for first. Let's all have a good laugh to start this > issue at the expense of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company > Security Department. They must really think they are hot stuff. PAT] While this refers to an incident circa 1976, it should be noted that Pac*Bell's security department continues its tradition of ultra-silly behavior and attitude even to this day. A couple of years ago I was involved in consultations with the defendant in a "telephonic misconduct" case. At one point it was necessary to visit the local FBI office to review the physical evidence that the bureau was intending to use against the alleged wrongdoer. In addition to the agents, the head of security for Pacific Bell was on hand, presumably to protect the interests of his company during my pawing of the evidence. Among the many harmless-looking items was a street map of the south Bay Area. My curiosity could no longer be suppressed, so I asked, "What is the significance of this particular item?" With that, I waved the map in the air. Mr. Security immediately rushed over, grabbed the map out of my hand and announced, "that is a map that has been marked to REVEAL Pacific Bell central office locations!" "May I see it, please?" One of the FBI agents motioned for Mr. Security to return the map to my hands, at which time I opened it and spread it out on the table. Then I proceeded to deliberately and obviously run my finger to a dozen or so points on the map saying, "There is no mark here; no mark here; no mark here...", etc. Mr. Security's eyes were becoming as big as saucers. "No, this is not a map of central office locations. What marks there are on this map are not designating them at all." Mr. Security came unglued. "How do YOU know where the central offices are located? Those locations are SECRET!" I explained to him that not only were the buildings themselves plainly marked with gigantic Pac*Bell logos, but the complete listing of exchange areas with maps and CO locations was available to any equipment vendor or service reseller. At the same time, I informed him that another piece of evidence, the test number directory, was also available to the public. That dude had one long face. There are some telco people who apparently missed what happened in 1984! John Higdon | P.O. Box 7648 | +1 408 264 4115 | FAX: john@ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | 10288 0 700 FOR-A-MOO | +1 408 264 4407 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Welcome back to the Digest, John. For the newer readers among us (those joining in the past year or so), John was a regular participant for several years prior to the great schism which occurred now about as year ago. Glad you chose to post again John, and perhaps you will be around more often. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 14:05:21 CDT From: Andrew C. Green Subject: Re: Reading the TELECOM Digest May Be a Crime Our Moderator writes: > The little book published by the Radio Hobbyists Guild was given away > to anyone who sent a dollar or four postage stamps with a self addressed > large envelope ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ... and address it "Care of Congressman Dan Rostenkowski..." :-) Aw, I couldn't resist... Andrew C. Green (312) 266-4431 Datalogics, Inc. Internet: acg@dlogics.com 441 W. Huron Chicago, IL 60610-3498 FAX: (312) 266-4473 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thank you for your input into this discussion Andrew. Yeah, Dan Rostenkowski finally got his come-uppance after all these years. I think he would prefer the dollar bill instead of the stamps. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V14 #330 ******************************