Minutes for SLAC-SEECS Meeting December 07, 2011.

General

Sadia has sent Ghulam details of how to fill SLAC user account form. He will send them back today.

Suggestion for Pingtable Regional Data selection - Anjum and Amber

Amber has added PERN_POP and PERN_NON-POP group to pingtable.pl however the groups cannot be added in Table.pl. We can add regional groups for making report and delete them afterwards.

IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam

The IP Address was allocated by the Networks Department but they did not inform us. Anjum did not keep track of it, hence the delay. Ghulam Nabi tried to install pinger on IPV6 enabled machine last week. Not working yet.

A possible project would be to make traceroute.pl work on a dual stack IPv6 host (say to traceroute to ipv6.google.com). Will need to look at gethostbyname etc. Is there any interest?

Another is to make pingtable.pl and getdata.pl IPV6 capable.

ICFA and HEC Report - Anjum and Amber

Amber has started working on ICFA annual report.

Amber has started working on HEC Six Monthly report.

• POP to POP analysis: Analysis from Pern POP Islamabad Headquarter to main POP nodes of each region.
• MIN RTT findings and traceroute results from POP to NON-POP nodes

Anjum has presented September Report to HEC. Some important responses were:

• Report highlighted Islamabad HQ deployment issue. Traffic is higher in Islamabad than in any other region.
• Report highlighted the problematic routers. HEC will look into fixing them.
• HEC will show the gathered data to the mathematics department of some of the universities who will research on this data.
• HEC has agreed to let us know the routing changes whenever made.

Imdad, a PhD student at SEECS will be helping Amber in HEC six monthly report.

PingER Explorer - Amber

• Amber has put together an email list of PingER contacts to send the video to. We will send email about Explorer to the list.

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts - Amber

As updated on 12/07/2011.

Responsible person: Joun Muhammad

All nodes deployed at PERN PoPs are being upgraded to enhance security. I had discussed with Umar as to what security features should be implemented on these nodes. If anyone notices a change in working of PoP nodes within next 2 weeks, please highlight it so that we can fix the problem.

PingER traceroute archive site - Sadia and Ghulam

Ghulam will send the list of monitoring nodes that are down. There should be script which collects the status of nodes per-day. Will be done once new pinger installment is done

PingER archive site - Ghulam

A few days back when Ghulam was working on database on archive site, it crashed. As a result Ghulam had to rebuild it from scratch. We might want to look into the suggestion of making a back up file. The backup would be on a seperate machine. Backup file can be replaced by a new backup file every night or every 2 days or may be every week.

• • Database is fixed now.
  • Getdata.pl is fixed and working fine now.
  • SEECS version of scripts is working fine and is using strict and running without errors.
  • Ghulam with the help of Zafar is removing threads and adding parallel loops. This would help in fixing the sorting issues of pintable.pl
  • Next step is to migrate old data to the new database. Since the pinger data has many anomalies it will need some care filtering
  • IPV6 machine is working fine. Ghulam installed pinger2 on it and tried to collect data. But it was unable to resolve the IPV6 address. Seems like we need to do some changes in the whole architecture make it workable with IPV6. 

Adding MOS and Alpha to pingtable.pl (awaits pingtable-db & getdata-db.pl working first)

• Analysis scripts to add Mean Opinion Score and Alpha, some things need to be correctly configured. It has been deployed athttp://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 - Sadia and Bilal

Following targets in Europe are not plotted on maps.

For example the first target can be explored here . This can be compared to a target which can be plotted on the map .

Bilal looked into it and found that nodes are plotted using other GeoIP and IP tracking tools. Possibly there is some error in Tulip map code because of which these nodes are not plotted on Tulip map.

CBG TULIP Integration -- FYP (Bilal)

• Bilal did some stress testing. The landmarks are 331 while the targets will be the ones generated by Sadia. He will compare the results with the 4 month old results with 59 hosts.
• Bilal has completed the stress testing for North America. Complete report and related excel files are placed here.  Turns out the data was not limited to N. America. Requested redo with more information and accurate selection.
• Stress Testing report  for Europe, with data set  and calculations  are attached. The final comparison is shown here. Europe Graph.png  
• Next will be to prepare stress testing report on South Asia.

PerfSONAR (Pakistan)

• PerfSONAR at SEECS: PerfSONAR throughput and latency nodes are now up and running at SEECS. Hostnames and corresponding IP adresses are:**  throughput measurement node: http://psbw.seecs.edu.pk/ (http:115.186.132.154/toolkit/) 
  • latency measurement node: http://psla.seecs.edu.pk/ (http://115.186.132.155/toolkit/)
• Select options under "Service Graphs" to view throughput or latency graphs. Added 5 Stratum 1 NTP servers to cater for clock delay and everything seems to work fine.
• There are some interesting one-way latency graphs at 115.186.132.155 (SEECS PerfSONAR Latency node). Dst to Src (e.g MIT to SEECS) latency is less than Src to Dst (e.g SEECS to MIT) latency. This might uncover some trends in outbound network traffic from Pakistan.
• Bilal and Ghulam will have a meeting with Zafar to know about PerfSonar and to maintain it in future. Update?

Possible projects

• There can be a paper kind of talking on Pinger if we could just find the right conference. MCN, ICC and Globecomm do provide network monitoring topics. We can talk of GEO-Location experiences. For example within Pakistan it works fine, however as we go within regions or continents this gets worse. We can publish some stats on that for example. We are yet not ready for Tulip paper.
• 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. 

Future meeting time - Les

1. Next meeting on Thursday 15th December at 8:00 pm in US and Friday 16th December at 9:00am in Pakistan.