Dranesville AT&T bunker

My friend Craig forwarded me a link to a wonderful collection of information on AT&T’s old “long lines” infrastructure. It made me realize I’ve never told this story.

I’d seen this particular website before. I think a Slashdot story on AT&T putting up the old microwave towers for sale prompted me to do some Google searches, after which I spent a lot of time looking through this stuff.

I’ve found this map particularly interesting. I used to live in Northern Virginia near to the non-incorporated area known as Dranesville. You can see many of these routes converging at Dranesville. At the time I was intimately familiar with the phone phreaking technologies, possibly the only thing that Apple-cofounder Steve Wozniak and I have in common. Figuring out how the phone system worked was a fun challenge.

The neighborhood we lived in during the mid-1980s had big houses on large grassy lots. It was built in a former grazing field. It looked like most any subdivision except for the small building on the hill near the entrance. You know, the one with the helicopter pad!

The building in question is in the center of this Google Map, and my former home is marked with the A. This is the AT&T bunker that those Dranesville cables come through. If you look closely at the satellite photos you can see a number of circular air vents on the western side of the building. These went very deep into the ground and exchanged air between the surface and the bunker. There is an elevator in the building which leads down. I’m not sure how far down it all goes.

Needless to say for a teenage geek, having a bunker in the neighborhood was pretty damn exciting! It was a small brick building on a small grassy but well-maintained hill. There was a simple, small AT&T sign at the end of the driveway and that was it. It wasn’t even fenced. Cows grazed in the field behind it.

A guy about my age lived right next door to us. I remember his mom worked at the facility. I’m not sure what she did there and I don’t think she ever got into too much detail. It stayed a mystery for years, though. Back in those days (pre-Internet) I had no real way of knowing what it was or why it was there. Only through the magic of the Internet did I finally figure out its importance.

As you know, during the Cold War nuclear war was a real possibility. Around Kennedy’s time, I believe, the U.S. government realized the need to have redundant communications infrastructure. The Feds knew that a bomb dropped on Washington would wipe out the telecommunications serving D.C. Thus, the answer was to run redundant lines to the periphery of the city where they might survive a nuclear blast. The podunk spot on the map that Dranesville was certainly didn’t need that scale of communications!

Soon the bunkers became obsolete: first by the devastating improvements made to nuclear weapons, then by the growth of fiber optics.There was no longer a need for a helicopter pad at my neighborhood bunker, though the bunker is still apparently used by AT&T.

I hope one day that I can get a tour of this place. If it ever gets put on the block like many of AT&T’s other bunkers I would love to bid on it. I would build a stately home on top of it and erase all visible vestiges of its former use. The only clue to anything unusual would be the long elevator ride between floors!

Mark

My friends were ultimately successful in their balloon launch yesterday! Tanner Lovelace posted a collection of near-space photographs on his Flickr page.

Amazing work, folks!

Update: Here’s a nice video slideshow of the launch.

I am not involved in the project (I’m at the beach now), which kills me because I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. The best I can do is what everyone else can do, which is track the balloon online. Those in Raleigh can see the launch at Horseshoe Farm Park at 8 AM Sunday.

Update 23 August: Success! See the results!

Now I can’t remember what BIND option actually did this. Any other sysadmin geeks out there know how to do this?

Update: Found it! It’s the $GENERATE feature. Cool!

Tonight I noticed that the MIME type image/pjpeg wasn’t being properly parsed by Mailman’s Scrubber.py script. Having dealt with MIME type problems before, I suspected that the problem wasn’t with Mailman itself but the operating system’s definition of the MIME type.

Sure enough, checking the /etc/mime.types file revealed there was no image/pjpeg type defined. A little more Internet hunting brought me to this post on the Mailman list, confirming the missing mime.type info as the culprit:

On Jan 6, 2010, at 8:18 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

> * Ralf Hildebrandt :
>> I have a list where the attachments are removed and stored on the
>> mailman server itself.
>>
>> This works like a charm, but SOME image attachments of the type:
>>
>> image/pjpeg
>>
>> are stored as “attachment.bin” instead of “attachment.jpg”
>>
>> Why?
>> Example below:
>
> adding “image/pjpeg” to /etc/mime.types fixed that:
>
> image/jpeg jpeg jpg jpe
> image/pjpeg jpeg jpg jpe

This is because Mailman uses Python’s mimetypes module to generate the file
name, and I believe that consults /etc/mime.types where available. Since
before you edit Python didn’t know anythig about image/pjpeg, it assumed it was
random binary data, hence the .bin suffix.

-Barry

From what I can find out, image/pjpeg is a type that Microsoft products choose to use instead of the image/jpeg that the rest of the world uses. I guess those crazy Redmonders are just trying to keep us on our toes, eh?

Anyone who has used the popular Internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the Internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.

Naturally every firewall must also let packets through into the local network – after all the user wants to view websites, read e-mails, etc. The firewall must therefore forward the relevant data packets from outside, to the workstation computer on the LAN. However it only does so, when it is convinced that a packet represents the response to an outgoing data packet. A NAT router therefore keeps tables of which internal computer has communicated with which external computer and which ports the two have used.

The trick used by VoIP software consists of persuading the firewall that a connection has been established, to which it should allocate subsequent incoming data packets. The fact that audio data for VoIP is sent using the connectionless UDP protocol acts to Skype’s advantage. In contrast to TCP, which includes additional connection information in each packet, with UDP, a firewall sees only the addresses and ports of the source and destination systems. If, for an incoming UDP packet, these match an NAT table entry, it will pass the packet on to an internal computer with a clear conscience.

via How Skype & Co. get round firewalls – The H Security: News and Features.

My son Travis accidentally deleted a digital movie he took with his camera. He was so disappointed, so I took up the task of trying to undelete the file. If his camera’s SD card was formatted with Linux’s ext3 filesystem his file would be impossible to retrieve.

Fortunately, all digital camera cards are formatted with the tried-and-true MS-DOS vfat filesystem, which makes undeleting files trivial. I even found a Linux tool called TestDisk that can easily retrieve deleted files. In seconds, I had fetched Travis’s deleted file.

If you are a Linux-head like me and need to bring a file back from the dead, try TestDisk!

Capital Area Greenway

I was thinking again (I know, I know. I should stop that bad habit) about Raleigh and the potential for a municipal Internet network (or a Google one). It occurred to me that the miles and miles of greenways Raleigh enjoys would make the perfect place to run a fiber backbone across our city. We’ve got greenways stretching into every corner of our city and more are being built and stitched-together every year. Why not make burying conduit part of every greenway construction project going forward?

This would not only make use of a unique, existing Raleigh resource but it might also speed the adoption and construction of greenways. Some neighbors take a dim view of greenways in their neighborhood, associating them with crime in spite of evidence that shows greenways improve property values. Now, if neighbors knew that a greenway passing through their neighborhood meant ultra-fast fiber Internet service was coming to their homes they might be more welcoming of them.

It seems to me to be a dirt-simple idea that would position Raleigh for the pathways of the future: fiber-optic Internet!

I was thinking more about the Google Fiber project today. It occurred to me that Google might actually be doing more to put the brakes on municipal broadband than Time Warner Cable and its cronies ever could.

As long as the possibility is out there that Google may build a network in a certain city, that city won’t be investing in its own broadband infrastructure. Google is guaranteed to disappoint the huge majority of applicants with its selection of a few cities, but nevertheless I can forsee city officials everywhere holding up Google as an excuse not to spend money on developing their own broadband. “Let’s hold off until we hear from Google,” they’ll say.

Google would do well in furthering its “fiber everywhere” cause by not keeping everyone in suspense.

In response to the overwhelming demand that 1,100 communities showed for the Google Fiber project, Google created the Fiber for Communities website. This site is a collection of resources that is intended to pave the way for communities to acquire fiber Internet.

I really like how Google has positioned this new effort. They know that their fiber project will only serve a handful of communities, leaving many to fend for themselves. By creating this site, Google shows it is committed to sharing its findings and supporting those communities who want to make this jump.

It’s been my position all along that communities cannot wait for Google to ride in on a white horse and save them from moribund broadband. The odds of that are pretty low. While I would be thrilled for Google to choose Raleigh for its Google Fiber project, lately I have come to see the value of Google not picking Raleigh.

I’ve been an advocate for municipal broadband, and very proud to have had a hand in beating back every attempt by the big telecom companies to block it. I would take just as much pride in assisting my city in the creation of its own fiber network. Yeah, Google could come in and solve all of our problems, but that would deny us the knowledge and experience gained from building our own network from scratch.

And for the record, I don’t begrudge telecom companies. I think they offer a great product. At the same time, I think there is plenty of room for more competition in this industry. If nothing else, Google has shown that there is plenty of demand for more broadband options.