Minutes for SLAC-SEECS Meeting December 22, 2011.

An extra meeting was held on Thursday 22nd December 2011 8:15 pm PCT to discuss the same agenda points. Les, Umar, Sadia, Amber and Ghulam attended the meeting.

General

Sadia sent Ghulam new forms to get registered in SLAC directory. SLAC is shutdown until Jan 2nd 2012, so Ghulam will have to wait for his SID and then computer account until next year

Shahryar in the news see http://tribune.com.pk/story/333244/app-developer-missing-the-silicon-valley-bandwagon-starts-the-journey-for-khan/

IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam

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 to make it workable with IPV6. Les looked at pinger2.pl, it verifies the address is IPv4 4 octets. He made a suggestion to use valid_ip.pl to verify both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. Ghulam are there other parts of pinger2.pl that need modifiying. It already can access ping6. In addition one will need a copy of pinger.xml with IPv6 hosts and their addresses.

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, again this could use valid_ip.pl. Since Ghulam is working on these it would be good for him to add this.

Ghulam is focusing on the new pinger database so IPv6 is not high priority.

pinger2.pl

There is a bug in pinger2.pl that results in the <BeaconList> being empty. I believe this is since before loading the new <BeaconList> it clears the old one. I have made a fix that may help.

ICFA and HEC Report - Anjum and Amber

• Amber and Les working on ICFA annual report.
  • Fig 4 is currently MOS, it should be loss
  • We need maps of 2008 and 2011 showing min RTT
  • Normalized throughput had an error, Les has fixed, so Amber needs to redo the normalized throughput in Figs 8 and 10.
• Amber is working on HEC Six Monthly report.
  • POP to POP analysis: Analysis from Pern POP QAU Islamabad to main POP nodes of each region.
  • MIN RTT findings and traceroute results from POP to NON-POP nodes
  • Outliers
  • For the future reports you can use September report as the border line for good and bad nodes. For example some metric threshold value would be: Jitter >0.5, Avg RTT >75ms, loss > x is bad.

• Imdad, a PhD student at SEECS will be helping Amber in HEC six monthly report. Amber and Imdad will have a meeting at 11pm Friday 16th December  to discuss the report. They did not meet as Imdad had to fly to Riyadh for Honet conference. He will be back on Januray 2nd 2012

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. Tomorrow.

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts - Amber

As updated on 12/22/2011.

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.

HEC is sending out letters to the contact persons (who are non-cooperative) after which the nodes will be more reliable. 2-3 weeks will show much more stable nodes.

PingER map

There are problems with it not displaying the pull down list of monitoring sites and also not displaying ballons for monitors and beacons. Les is working with Faisal.

PingER archive site - Ghulam

Ghulam has rebuilt the database.

• PerfSonar Schema is found to be more manageable and if we could use it, then we can easily merge pingER with PerfSonar. Hence, Ghulam will work on getdata.pl to modify the scripts(without threads). Ghulam sent a document on the the three formats/schema (raw data flat files, the test PingER schema, and the perfSONAR schema) . If we go with the perfSONAR schema we will need to add the project type, the ping and traceroute servers, the data server, possibly contacts etc.
• Schema has been updated by Sadia. The new schema has PerfSonar and pingtables required fields in separate tables.
• Sadia will work on migrating data from flat files to the new databases. Sadia is working on it.
• Ghulam with the help of Zafar is removing threads and adding parallel loops. This would help in fixing the sorting issues of pingtable.pl. Ghulam is working on it.

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.
• Another useful addition would be max-rtt. This is useful for looking for buffer bloat (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat).

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.

He found that the problem is in the load function. He sent email to Faisal to try and understand what is going on. It is possible Sadia may also be able to help.

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 and Europe .
• Bilal added one more column to the table which would be GeoIP distance from the Lat Long in Node-details. 
• From the latest results it is apparent that if the landmark is also the target then we  can get 0 error. Bilal will look at filtering out such cases and then rerun the tests for N. America, Europe, S. Asia, E. Asia and Australia.

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 Wednesday 4th January, 2012 at 8:00 pm in US and  Thursday 5th January, 2012 at 9:00am in Pakistan.