Agenda for SEECS/SLAC meeting October 21st 2010.

Pakistani case study – Fahad, Anjum

Zafar has offered to take the case study over.

  1. nwfpuet, uettaxila, ustb (has never been any data), uob are down for several days: see http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/checkdata/). Kashif Sataar of SEECS is managing the hosts and contacts host contacts in case of problems. Is this happening?
    1. UPesh problem: Dr. Anjum will email them about this. They were pursuing the wrong problem before that. See [http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/checkdata/] and "try to get data" for UPesh. UPesh is gathering data but there is "0" at the end of each entry which means that it didn't receive anything back.
    2. Future visits to the provinces of Balochistan and KP (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).
    3. Kashif Sattar of SEECS is deploying and managing hosts and contacts. Muhammad Zeeshan will slowly be taking over from Kashif Sattar (who is leaving if he is not granted an extension by NUST).
  2. Dr. Anjum is verifying that table.pl at SEECS has all the known Pakistani monitors.
    1. About 10 nodes do not have complete information and thus aren't pinging other nodes. Dr. Anjum will look into this. This has to be done one by one in order to keep things clear.
    2. Dr. Anjum will also send information for those nodes which are missing from the nodes list. Zafar will add those to the PingER and TULIP databases.
  3. UET, UOB, LSE, COMSATS do not have full set of Pakistani beacons. See matrix. The Pakistani monitoring nodes are supposed to get the beacon list from SEECS. – Anjum said he has a student who can fix but need password so they can fix the nodes so they get the list from the SEECS server. Is there any progress?
    1. UOB, UETTaxila: Dr. Anjum will contact them about this.
  4. There appears to be an anomaly in the RTTs to vle.iiu.edu.pk (AKA PK.IIU.EDU.N2) from the Pakistani monitors it is over 200ms while from SLAC as displayed in pingtable.pl it is 67ms. Yet if I do it from the command line it is ~ 310ms from pinger. The traceroute shows it as going via London and Singapore which suggests it is on its way to Pakistan. This needs investigating. Pingtable.pl is current as of yesterday so maybe something happened between then and when I pinged a few minutes ago. Also www.iiu.edu.pk has an RTT from SLAC of 177ms. TULIP shows it as in Europe.  Thus I have removed this host from the NODEDETAILS database since it is probably a proxy and not in Pakistan.. 
  5. [Pending by Dr. Anjum] Problem with UPESH node, it is not pinging, a ping with custom target also doesn't work. Traceroute works. Moreover the node is pingable from SLAC which dismisses the possibility of pings being blocked.

Progress on ICFA Report 2011 - Zafar

Integrate into the report:

  1. 2010 Updates on Africa (done)
  2. Inland African fibre optics (done)
  3. African NREN (done)
  4. Mean Opinion Score
  5. Regions of the World graphs
  6. Throughput graphs
  7. PingER metrics (done)

Dr. Les and Zafar need to discuss on what to keep and what to remove from ICFA report. What shall be the contents of the report?

Zafar should involve Saadia. They are already working on HEC monthly report.

PerfSONAR

  1. Can we install perfSONAR services on host in PERN network. Faisal is learning perfSONAR so at a later date this may be an interesting project.
  2. Faisal is working with Yee. Progress - Faisal
  3. Zafar - deploy PerfSONAR nodes at SEECS.

TULIP

  1. Big problem with integrated version of Apollonius and Tri-Lateration not working in TULIP Live - Faisal
  2. [Pending by Zafar] Will try again if possible.

TULIP GUI - Faisal

All pending tasks completed.

Possible project

No progress

  1. [Pending by Faisal] Add traceroute & ping to my host and to selected host
    • Build on TULIP map
  2. The advantage compared to other traceroute maps is that the laundering keeps only good servers.
  3. [Pending by Faisal] Dashboard for PingER management. Faisal will start correspondence with Amber.
  4. [Done by Zafar] Put up an explanation for re-implementation of CBG algorithm (currently in Matlab code). Zafar can also collaborate with Dr. Anjum, a new faculty member and a student (Ghulam Nabi, Naseer, Maqsood) who can work on this.

Future - Les

Umar has yet to talk at length with Anjum/Arshad. Any progress?

Paper - Umar, Fida, Zafar

  1. We still don't believe in TULIP trilateration results. We will give upon it.
  2. [Pending - Umar] SVN for paper, Umar has set it up and it is working, Umar will send out the accounts.
  3. Where do we go from here, do we await INFOCOM comments?
    • Do we rewrite with a new story, rewrite the introduction explaining what we are trying to sell, focus on comparative analysis, global extension, dependence on landmarks, tool. Put together a bulleted points of what the story line is. Umar, Fida, Zafar, Les will put together story line bullets. For the next meeting in a week. We need to identify where it is being submitted to determine what to focus on. Two possible venues are PAM (paper Oct 9, abstract Oct 2nd) and IMC-- Umar is looking at. Struggling whether to focus on Apollonius or comparative analysis. He is comfortable with Zafar's storyline. Fida will put together a paragraph on financial side for the motivation.
  4. [Pending - Fida and Umar] Do we go with comparative analysis, if we do then do we include Apollonius, if we do how we include it. Need to identify where we are useful. Mobility scenarios: mobility, routers, database does not have up to date info, e.g. mobile nodes moving country to country, do well if target is close to a landmark.
  5. Need to identity other papers to quote how the 5 parameters we use affect the result,
    • How much time can Umar spend on it?
    • Fall semester starts Monday so Umar cannot drive.
    • Need a person to drive the paper, in particular the first few pages with the storyline.
    • Ideally the person to re-write is Fida, he wants to do it, but with 3 courses and assignments but cannot be the driving force. Can Zafar take the reins. Zafar is volunteering to re-write the story line. Made a few changes to the Introduction part last week. Added a few lines about infrastructure. Feedback and guidelines required. Fida and Zafar are prepared to respond to comments/questions in 24-48 hours.
    • 1st step put together a story line in Google wave.

Tentative roadmap:

  1. We are focusing on extending Geolocation coverage with relevance to the financial aspect of Geolocation. We claim that this is going to be the best service of coming year. We need some facts and figures in order to justify this claim (Action by Fida).
  2. Possible question: Why are we using IP geolocation to extend geolocation coverage in new regions? Why not DB based approach? We know that DB based geolocation has some inherent problems. But we need some real world examples with references to nail down this issue. (Action by Zafar & Co).
  3. We claim that four infrastructural attributes affect the performance of Geolocation techniques. We need to find some published research material that have emphasized these parameters together or individually. So that nobody can argue that why are you using these parameters and why not other parameters.

Future meeting time - Les

9pm Thursday 21st October will be the next formal meeting.

  • No labels