When your computer is powered on, among the first parts to "wake up" is the BIOS. This is like a nerve center, or the medulla of your brain.
The BIOS has pre-saved instructions to hand off control to another section of the computer which holds an operating system, usually it's Windows installed on a hard drive within the computer. We call these sections "environments." This is like the medulla (low level functioning) handing off control to your cerebral cortex (high level functioning).
The BIOS has options on which environment to hand off control to. The choice is determined by a pre-programmed boot order. The boot order says "Try booting to X first. If X is not there, try booting to Y."
One type of environment is called PXE, pronounced "Pixie" in the IT industry. PXE exists so the BIOS can boot to an environment through a network connection instead of a hard drive. The BIOS detects the ethernet connection, then detects a remote PXE server to talk to, then hands off control to the remote server at the other end of that network connection. The hard drive is out of the loop.
The PXE hand off must be pre-configured in BIOS. It is not a default (from factory) setting in BIOS. PXE must manually be enabled, and the boot order must manually be set to boot to PXE.
In the case of the election server, if a bad actor does not want to remotely boot through PXE, he can just disable the connection to the remote PXE environment. No one will notice as the machine boots to its local hard drive. However, if the connection is establish, just reboot the system and it's instantly running from a remote environment located anywhere.
You just said why. Generally, unless you are on a massive, massive network, the same hardware that runs your router is also going to host your DHCP server, DNS server, time server, etc.
So even winding this train of thought back further, they could have changed the time at the server, thus making all the connected devices potentially record events as occurring at a different date/time than they actually did. The whole fact that these voting devices were networks just opens up such a can of worms, it's insane.
Its way beyond insane. I've worked with computers sense I built my 386DX16 in 1990. You gave a pretty good rundown. I'm wondering maybe if they didn't use DHCP and/or other dynamic protocols because they weren't sure they could control that part of the network at all locations like in red counties so they coded it to go to a specific IP or series of IPs. If so then that should provide a real world location that all this traffic went to.
I work for the company that made the server.
I'll translate this into normie speak:
When your computer is powered on, among the first parts to "wake up" is the BIOS. This is like a nerve center, or the medulla of your brain.
The BIOS has pre-saved instructions to hand off control to another section of the computer which holds an operating system, usually it's Windows installed on a hard drive within the computer. We call these sections "environments." This is like the medulla (low level functioning) handing off control to your cerebral cortex (high level functioning).
The BIOS has options on which environment to hand off control to. The choice is determined by a pre-programmed boot order. The boot order says "Try booting to X first. If X is not there, try booting to Y."
One type of environment is called PXE, pronounced "Pixie" in the IT industry. PXE exists so the BIOS can boot to an environment through a network connection instead of a hard drive. The BIOS detects the ethernet connection, then detects a remote PXE server to talk to, then hands off control to the remote server at the other end of that network connection. The hard drive is out of the loop.
The PXE hand off must be pre-configured in BIOS. It is not a default (from factory) setting in BIOS. PXE must manually be enabled, and the boot order must manually be set to boot to PXE.
In the case of the election server, if a bad actor does not want to remotely boot through PXE, he can just disable the connection to the remote PXE environment. No one will notice as the machine boots to its local hard drive. However, if the connection is establish, just reboot the system and it's instantly running from a remote environment located anywhere.
If done right, no one notices.
You just said why. Generally, unless you are on a massive, massive network, the same hardware that runs your router is also going to host your DHCP server, DNS server, time server, etc.
So even winding this train of thought back further, they could have changed the time at the server, thus making all the connected devices potentially record events as occurring at a different date/time than they actually did. The whole fact that these voting devices were networks just opens up such a can of worms, it's insane.
Bingo.
Thank you for the explaination
Its way beyond insane. I've worked with computers sense I built my 386DX16 in 1990. You gave a pretty good rundown. I'm wondering maybe if they didn't use DHCP and/or other dynamic protocols because they weren't sure they could control that part of the network at all locations like in red counties so they coded it to go to a specific IP or series of IPs. If so then that should provide a real world location that all this traffic went to.
What a mess.