Agenda for SEECS/SLAC meeting June 22, 2011.

Bold face topics are to be addressed in the meeting.

Upcoming

Zafar Gilani is leaving for Pakistan on ?July 1st, 2011.

Future & Publicity

• Faisal and Les are putting together a video on the motion charts. It is at the editing stage. 
  
• Public Data Explorer Next Gen Motioncharts. 
  • Faisal is creating DSPL dataset
  • Concepts are done, tested few slices and a table. 
  • Incrementally building tables based on concepts and slices (no debugging or error tracking)
  • Provide amber the csv structure

Pakistani case study - Zafar, Anjum

1. 36 hosts are deployed so far and are aiming to deploy 60 hosts in total in Pakistan. As I understand it SEECS will be responsible for the hosts and their PingER app
2.  Another 10 nodes are in progress and they would be active in about a month. In about two months, 17 new nodes are expected to be functional.
3. Amber has updated the spreadsheet of network performance in Pakistan by adding MOS.

Dr. Anjum and his team at SEECS presented the Pinger performance in reference to PERN and POPs to HEC (Anwar Amjad and his team).The meeting was held on Tuesday 7th June 2011. Now they want

• Write a report of PoP to PoP analysis based on the presentation showed in last meeting. Remove the outliers for future work. Add unreachability for June.
• Also compare the results of SLAC to PERN and NIIT to PERN. See if they appear different. Look at pingtable.pl to confirm the asymmetry between AIOU and LCWU. 
• Keep checking the traceroute for pingerjms so as to figure out why there are extra hops for pingerjms.pern.edu.pk.

Latest PERN network map

Anjum got latest PERN map. Notes from Anjum: The provided map is better than the existing one but its still not complete in information and not immediately useable for our purposes. HEC PERN topology maps have yet not been received. Dr. Anjum is reminding them but no progress yet.

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts

Responsible people:

• Muhammad Talal Hussain
• Joun Muhammad
  

PingER managment

• Amber is starting to email contacts with non working monitors. 
• Top Level PingER page developed by Faisal is now available here.
• Connectivity. pl is being modified by Sadia to add node selection by means of a pull down list.
• Sadia will modify pcm.html to give the current monitor hosts by generating the html file from a script.
• Amber has organized the Case Studies.

PingER traceroute archive site

• See http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/traceroutearchive.cgi
• Autotrace.pl is now getting the nodes name from NODEDETAILS added by sadia.
  • Assuming user knows  when the change has occured, it is given a flexibilty to see traceroutes difference from three dates . This has been added by sadia
• some improvements needed:
  • Difference using only IP's and name in traceroute  currently done.
  • Enable selection of days bracketing an RTT step change to see if there was a traceroute change then.
  • Provide better default hosts (e/g/ PERN and SEECS) done.
• Extend to traceroutes from SLAC.

PingER archive site -- FYP (Ghulam and Farhan)

• Changed getdata.pl script to collect nodes data from Nodes table instead of nodes.cf file because it will not be used in new architecture. The fields where sequence number or rtt is not present, NULL is used.
• Main analysis script is analyze-hourly.pl which executes daily on archive site and does analysis. This script has also been changed to get input for analysis from ping_data table instead of files. Tested and optimized.
• Other scripts analyze-daily.pl, analyze-monthly.pl, analyze-allmonths.pl, analyze-allyears.pl will be changed to get nodes information from nodes table instead of nodes.cf file. Remember these scripts are using the same data that analyze-hourly.pl is inserting into the analysis table.
• New script for both data collection and analysis has been completed and tested.
• Testing of time complexity for a certain number of files and comparing the results for flat-files and new schema, is in progress.
• Testing results will be available in a couple of days.
• Port to SLAC
  

Pinger New Schema (Zafar and Co.)

• The new schema of PingER which is close to perfsonar is designed such that it stores raw data as well as analyzed data in the same table. Previous architecture of PingER first collects the data into files or table, then analyze this data and store results in another file or table. And then these hourly results are used for calculating daily and monthly results. The mechanism is as follows:*# At archive site, as the data is downloading from monitoring sites line by line, the new script does not store this data in to file on table but it uses each line's data (Basically one line contains sequence numbers, RTTs, packet size, packets sent and recieved, time and nodes information) and calculate different metrics by using data of this line.*# Stores these calculated metrics into arrays or keys and moves to the next line and same procedure goes again and again for every line.
  1. When all lines are processed we calculate or aggregate results on hourly basis and store all related raw data and analyzed data for this hour in one row.
  2. Daily and monthly analysis scripts which are running separately use this data (that is calculated previously) and again store results in same table but this time no raw data is stored in respective rows which contains daily and monthly data.
     

Adding MOS and Alpha to pingtable.pl

• Analysis scripts to add Mean Opinion Score and Alpha, some things need to be correctly configured. It has been deployed at [[http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl|http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl]|http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl] for testing.
• Alpha and MOS to be implemented at SLAC site. Sadia will be doing this with the help of Zafar.Currently Ghulam and Farhan are working on synchronizing the SLAC and SEECS scripts.
  

TULIP

• PlanetLab landmarks are working. The problem was in timeouts. Fixed by Zafar.
• TULIP is still slow. The tiering into 0 and 1 done by reflex.cgi reduced times by a factor of 2.
• Enabling/disabling of hosts appears to be working. However, the disabling of hosts has not been turned back on in th daily cronjob. Les will look at again this weekend, and see whether to turn back on.
• Reflex.cgi is ready for production use. Bilal should convert to using it. Reading documentation would bring him in good shape.
• Bilal would be working on adding clients.
  

CBG TULIP Integration -- FYP (Bilal)

• TULIP setup on maggie2 server and CBG is running on PERN machine.
• CBG is modified to talk to TULIP. TULIP is modified for integration.
• Didn't work on MSIE, fixed by Bilal.
• Sadia is waiting for the MatLab license.
  

Best Line Approach CBG-TULIP (Zafar and Bilal):

First thing is the need of landmark sets and their RTT that can be fetched from a DB (They will be designing this DB).

Designing Database:

• need rules for defining sets . (landmark will have sets with all landmarks or will have selected ones  i.e. within a region or max RTT based )
• update frequency( daily/weekly)
  

Schema: one Table having RTT with pair of LandMark in each row.

create table pairs (
  hostName1 varchar(80) default null,
  hostName2 varchar(80) default null,
  continentOf1 varchar(100) default null,
  continentOf2 varchar(100) default null,
  rttFrom1To2 float default null,
  rttFrom2To1 float default null,
  lastUpdateDate timestamp not null
);

Procedure: Pick landmark fromTULIP db. For each landmark

• Pick another landmark 
• Get RTT from first to second landmark
• Get RTT from second to first landmark
• Take average of both landmarks
• Apply set defining rule. 
• Insert (land1,land2,RTT) in DB table if not present.
• Update RTT if land1 and land2 are present in DB table
  

Made a database named bestline with a landmarks table in it. TULIP Code is reformed such that it collects data from reflector.cgi and sites.xml and fills results in landmarks table. The data of this table is updated every time TULIP code is executed for finding a target.

Next Task is to enhance bestline.m so as to read data from table and use it for calculating geographical locations.

IPv6 activities at NUST SEECS, Pakistan

PingER2 works with IPv6, could start taking data and see what breaks. Here is the list of activities we have been doing at the moment:

• Training and Awareness: We have conducted a workshop and a seminar on IPv6. Another Seminar is planned in the coming weeks.
• Collaborations: We have created a tunnel with cybernet (local ISP) for global IPv6 connectivity. We have been allocated public IPv6 addresses by PSEB for R & D usage.
• Implementation: We are currently working for participation in world IPv6 day. Some of the services that we are currently working on are Webserver, DNS and local connectivity of IPv6 for SEECS users. We are short of dedicated hardware for this part and for this our proposal is under review. We hope to have full range of hardware covered once it is approved.
• Research: We have a team of 3-4 people working on Transition Mechanisms. Open source implementation of these mechanisms.Mobility Extensions. LISP for IPv6. Hands on implementation on NS2, GNS3.
  

We are setting up a testbed at SLAC initially it will be isolated from the Internet.

PerfSONAR (Pakistan)

• PerfSONAR at SEECS: Problems were fixed. NTP servers were causing considerable clock delay. Added close-by Stratum 1 NTP servers to solve the problem. Nodes were updated to PerfSONAR version 3.2 (Fedora distro). Nodes however are offline since they were disrupting normal traffic. We are waiting for 10 Mbps dedicated connection to switch the nodes back on. We have a 1 Mbps link for PerfSONAR (on temporary purposes). NUST is purchasing a 2 Mbps dedicated link from WorldCall. No progress yet .. routing issues are showing live IPs as inaccessible.
• PERN will deploy perfSONAR at HEC/Quetta. Someone is working on this. The university is close by HEC/Quetta. Hope in 4 weeks to have PingER monitoring node in 4 universities in the Quetta region.
•  Dr. Anjum is trying to get some live IPs for deploying PerfSONAR, however, no progress yet.
  

PerfSONAR (USA)

1. Zafar: Yee will meet Jason in person (at Joint Techs in Alaska in July) to tell him about SNMP-MA extensions. He thinks emailing is not a good idea. :P
2. Zafar: Currently working on extending FTMA (which is a new PerfSONAR service and currently under developement) to add in support for MySQL.
3. Faisal is fixing bugs with the new perfSonar mashup that Yee put up.
   

Possible projects

• See [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects].
• Extend the NODEDETAILS data base to allow entry support for whether the host is currenty pingable. 
• Extend Checkdata to provide emails automatically, see [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Extend+checkdata+to+make+it+more+useful]. Many of the ideas in the script node-contacts.pl are a step in this direction.
• Improve the PingER2 installation procedures to make it more robust. This might be something for the person(s) in Pakistan who are responsible for installing PingER2 at the Pakistani monitoring sites. They probably have found where the failures occurs. Also look at the FAQ, and ping_data.pl which has been improved to assist in debugging, could it be further improved (e.g. provide access to the httpd.conf file so one can see if it properly configured)? There are 2 students working on the PingER archive. *Is this something they could work on?*
•  [Fix PingER archiving/analysis package to be IPv6 conformant|IEPM:Make PingER IPV6 compliant]. Will build a proposal for an IPv6 testbed. They will try various transition techniques. A proposal has been prepared and that has been submitted to PTA. Adnan is a co PI. It is being evaluated today.  A small testbed has been established in SEECS and the plan to shift some of the network to IPv6. Bilal is part of 3 students involved with PingER and they will be involved with IPv6. They are porting the PingER archive site site to using a database. They have redeveloped the archive site using Umar's documentation. They have set up a small test archive site. They have gathering, archiving, analysis. They will design a new database. They will also try a port of PingER to IPv6. 
• Look at RRD event detection based on thresholds and how to extend, maybe adding plateau algorithm. Umar's algorithm did  not work in a predictable manner. 
• Provide near realtime plots of current pinger data using getdata_all.pl/wget. It will work as a CGI script with a form to select the host, the ping size, and the time frame to plot. It will use wget or getdata_all.pl to get the relevant data and possibly RRD/smokeping to display the data. Adnan thinks one of the students working on the archive site may take this on
  

Future meeting time - Les

The next meeting is Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 (8 pm) for people in US and Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 (8 am) for people in Pakistan.