Installation of video surveillance at polling stations

Good day.
Briefly about yourself: 5th year student majoring in "Organization and technology of information protection." One fine day I got a part-time job - installing video surveillance at polling stations.
Scrolling through the comments on the article , I decided to share technical, and not very technical, information about the video surveillance system in the upcoming elections with the habrasociety.

Technical part


We started working on January 23. We worked in teams of 2 people, my partner and I equipped 22 PECs from scratch, and we always came across the following equipment:

  • Notebook Lenovo Z570;
  • 2 Logitech C510 720p webcams;
  • UPS Ippon Back Power Pro 500;
  • ADLS modems Dlink-2540u / 2500u.

Notebook stuffing:
  • CPU - Intel core i3 second revision;
  • Video - half with integrated Intel video, half with a discrete graphics card from Nvidia;
  • HDD - 250GB / 320GB;
  • RAM - 2GB;

In addition, the kit included:
  • Metal anti-vandal cabinet (inside two double sockets + automatic machine);
  • Kensington lock cable either on key / or code;
  • 2 usb passive extension cords - 5m;
  • 2 usb active extension cords - 10m;
  • Surge protector (the plug is usual, to plug into the ups I had to cut the plug from the pilot and twist the wires with the complete plug from the UPS).

I also worked in the villages, the situation is the same there, but at some facilities the connection was not through a telephone line, but through satellite equipment, and instead of a modem, a power supply unit was provided, through which twisted-pair cable was connected to a laptop. I must say right away that I don’t know the details related to satellite equipment, it was installed before my arrival, and shielded twisted-pair cable was brought into the premises of the precinct. I only know that satellite equipment was installed by Telecom TK. Also, in some areas, communication was established through the equipment of local third-party providers (they pulled a twisted pair cable from the provider's modem).

The work began with the fact that we transported cabinets to objects, often in private cars. Then, at best, they talked with a representative of the election commission, at worst, with security guards / watchmen (people also work in the election commission, and everything human is alien to them, laziness and irresponsibility , including relaxation), who told where they would be ballot boxes, and tables of members of the election commission. There were also schemes of polling stations, but most of them did not coincide with reality, and the ballot box and tables of the election commission that we were interested in were depicted very roughly, without indicating sizes, distances, etc.

Then we set up metal boxes, looked for a telephone box, and learned from the telephone operators what kind of “our” pair was (mostly by telephone, although sometimes the telephone operator personally appeared). And they pulled up to their drawer ШВВП (220в) from the shield / socket (clings directly to the terminals of the socket) and a telephone 2-wire cable. Modems were issued pre-configured for a specific PEC, on each box there was a label with the PEC number, ip-address, ip gateway.

Already at this stage, 70% of the facilities had serious jambs on the part of Rostelecom: either the panic button hung on the issued pair, or there was no connection (dsl did not connect), or the PEC phone number was not allocated at all. Another story with villages where rotten telephone lines, 5 parallel phones on our telephone pair in different houses / schools / clubs, etc.

Then, when boxes were delivered at all the facilities, a telephone line was extended, and laptops and webcams (without extension cords) were handed out. The task - again to go to the facilities - to install PACs, turn on webcams, receive a confirmation code from Moscow.

This is where the fun begins.

An operating system was already installed on the laptops (by the way, not at all, 4 out of 22 turned out to be pristine with free dos :), they had to drive through the whole city and change to others).
The operating system is based on linux-e. According to my vague suspicions, the graphical shell is based on kde (font rendering is very similar), and the design is based on the classic Windows theme, only the buttons are not recessed when pressed, and it is unclear that it was pressed or the PAC hangs and did not catch the click. So it works very interestingly.

My task for configuring the PAC included the following:
  • Turn on the laptop;
  • Connect a modem to the laptop;
  • Put tags on cameras (under each window with a camera there is a drop-down menu where you can select one of the "Ballot Box" / "Election Commission" / "Counting Table");
  • Click the "Save" button to the right of the drop-down list with labels;
  • Press the button “Everything is configured. Request for confirmation code ";
  • Wait for the confirmation code, write it down.


But in reality ...

So, everything is connected, we press the treasured button to turn on the laptop. The BIOS greeting is loaded, GRUB (tried to get to its menu by holding SHIFT - ignores it), and finally - the graphical shell. All this happens surprisingly quickly enough - 10-15 seconds.

I apologize for the quality of the photo, there was nothing else at hand. The video receiver server lay down to rest (all photos are clickable) For my reasons, the registrar is here - the server from which the PAC receives information about the election commission number, the stream from the web cameras directly goes to the DVR. And apparently the Urn and the Commission are recorded on different servers (once half a day from several PECs at a time in technical support they saw a picture from only one camera, and there was no signal on the second).








Just want to talk about the shell. Three buttons are located in the upper right part of the screen:
"Network", "Offline mode", "Update software"

Click on the "Network" button: Click "Go to network settings": Click on "Offline mode": I wonder where and how it is going to be sent code? :) Next, to transfer the PAC to offline mode (where there is no connection), you need to enter a 10-digit code to determine the PEC. All.









image




Well, now the jambs begin ... 3-5 minutes, this miracle can not get an IP address. “I can’t get the ip address” “Trying to get the ip address”. Strange, we cross the patch cord into our laptop - an IP address is immediately issued. Well, okay, they waited for an IP address, then it contacts the registrar and receives the address and PEC number, which it happily notifies us of. Then the PAK measures the communication speed, on average, 200-1000 kbit / s. At PECs with Telecom-TZ, the speed is about 2 Mbps. Next, receives a video encoding scheme. As for the quality of the picture - the image until February 24 was 320x240, bitrate 128-256 Kbps. Looking ahead, I’ll say that on the 25th there was an update that increased the picture to 640x480, bitrate up to 512kbps for each camera. And maybe more, but personally I saw only such figures.

It immediately struck me that there was an opportunity to choose both cameras as the "Ballot Box", or as the "Election Commission."

image

And in general it is not clear why they made a manual selection of labels. By the way, for the first version of the software, the tags for some reason were not saved, or were not sent to the server, and therefore in Moscow they rejected the request for a confirmation code. Honestly, it was very enraging. In technical support (toll-free line), the only answer was to wait, reload, set tags again, again ask for a confirmation code, if it did not help, repeat. “It happens that only from 5 reboots are tags transmitted” (c). By the way, after rebooting, the labels from the cameras get lost (only in the first version of the software).

Another point - there is no status / messages about what the system is doing at the moment. It can be quietly updated, if at this moment, on the advice of technical support, turn off the laptop to reboot, we will get a white screen with a cursor, it will not load further. Periodically, at startup, the message “I can not boot. Possible actions: update, reload. ”A

confirmation code is issued by Moscow after the operator opens my PEC, checks the picture from the cameras, and checks the signatures from the cameras. If something is wrong (no signatures) - the request is rejected, and all over again. By the way, as it turned out later, the delay in the picture from the cameras is 2-5 minutes. Do I need to say how much time was wasted wasting time on rebooting the laptop, waiting for a confirmation code (20-40min on average), getting a negative answer and repeating all the steps?

Well, all right, we got the code in half with grief - we drove on.

After doing this operation at all PECs, we were given uninterruptible power supplies and pilots. Moreover, the pilot does not have an “input” suitable for the output of the UPS, so I had to cut the wires, twist, isolate, connect.

When all this was done, they gave usb extensions, and camera mount plates. USB extension cords are the cheapest and, as a result, barely alive. There were also poorly soldered connectors that fell apart, broken plastic cases of amplifiers (on active extension cords) came across.

Then it turned out that they had released a new version of the software, and now the tags on the cameras were registered tightly. Those. one camera, no matter how you plug it into a laptop, will always be labeled “Urn”, the other always labeled “Election Commission.” Changing usb ports does not help, only physically rearranging cameras. But after the reboot, the labels no longer get lost.

The authorities called from time to time and said that it was necessary to go there and there, there the PAK hung / the camera fell off / the connection was lost, etc. Yes, the laptops often hang, reboot themselves, the registrar server constantly crashed, webcams fell off on their own (one works, but the other one is red “no signal”) DHCP fell at one time, you had to manually enter the network settings. A couple of times, tech support said, "There are servers in Moscow, go home, today nothing will work." And it’s always hot in the box, sometimes even the walls are warm.

Organizational part (uninteresting, optional)


At the same time, the registration and signing of acts of equipment transfer and acceptance took place. It is also not so simple: often I had to search / call the owner of the object, every second refused to sign the paper.

In total, we visited every PEC for 6-7 times, lost a lot of time because of other people's jambs, waiting for responsible people, waiting for the end of lunch at Rostelecom, lunch at the election commission, lunch at the telephone operators.

And then the form of certificates of equipment transfer and acceptance was changed, and the acceptance form for safekeeping was added ... Again manually fill in all the equipment, serial numbers and two copies each. Go around all the PECs again. And the people again eats and refuses to sign.

Well, then there is the duty on PECs on March 4, emergency troubleshooting, and then dismantling the equipment. As far as I know, it has not yet been signed on paper whether the equipment will remain in schools or not.

I may repeat, but almost every day the servers fell, so I can not imagine how they will withstand the load on March 4 . And the equipment hangs, a break in communication, the cameras fall off only add fuel to the fire.

As for the angle of view of the cameras: at some sites, the placement of the commission tables, or the viewing angle of the camera, or the size of the room simply does not allow you to capture all the tables of the election commission.

I draw your attention to the fact that the equipment issued by Rostelecom was not all at once, but in parts. On the whole and in general, everything was pointless and merciless. Organizational issues are poorly thought out, the workflow is not so optimized that there are simply no words. After all, the deadlines are a little over a month. By the way, during the work, almost 5 thousand km were dashed by car.

Thank you all for your attention. I will be happy to answer your questions in the comments.

upd. On March 4, strangely enough PAKs worked without failures (on my PECs).
On the 6th, an order came from Rostelecom to urgently pick up laptops from certain PECs and bring them to the office. Apparently not everything went as smoothly as they tell us, apparently broadcasts were not recorded from some PECs. Moreover, on PAKs, they demanded to mark the number of the polling station and the assigned ip address. That's it.

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