• Created by Unknown User (amberzeb), last modified on Mar 07, 2012

Minutes for SLAC SEECS Meeting March 6th, 2012

General

We may not be able to get the MATLAB Toolkit for Tulip. Dr. Anjum proposed that we can use Mathemetica instead of MATLAB. He also proposed that he will try to find out some MS students who might take this conversion as his MS thesis. Students have to finalize their thesis by 6th April. By the second week of April, we will get to know if we have any student doing this.

Bilal and Dr. Anjum were unavailable this week, pre-informed. Ghulam did not show up. 

IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam (this has been de-prioritized until new database PingER is working)

Les has the passwords for monitor and the IPv6 host at SEECS. He has successfully logged on.

Les looked at pinger2.pl, it verifies the address is IPv4 4 octets. In addition one will need a copy of pinger.xml with IPv6 hosts and their addresses. There are 2 subroutines in traceroute.pl that may be useful in making pinger2.pl support IPv6. They are valid_ip and gethostbyname6.

Next we need to make pingtable.pl and getdata.pl IPV6 capable, again this could use the 2 subroutines. Since Ghulam and Sadia are working on these it would be good for them to add this.

pinger2.pl

Joun has installed the latest version  pinger2.pl that is not supposed to lose <BeaconsList> at 3 sites (cae.seecs.edu.pk, maggie2.seecs.edu.pk, aup.seecs.edu.pk). A month later (march 7, 2012) after install the <BeaconsList> appears OK on all three, i.e. for the <LastChecked> variable showed march 1st, 2012 for aup.seecs.edu.pk and maggie2.seecs.edu.pk, and showed March 7th, 2012 for cae.seecs.edu.pk. Joun may want to extend the deployment of the new pinger2.pl.

PingER Updates

  • Collection status webpage generates an email if a node does not work for more than 10 days. Update the script to report bug that  for first n days we do not get report.
  • Connectivity.pl is fixed to display the latest data (of hours of day that have passed) results on the web.
  • Harvey Newman sent new measurement results of HDI for 2011. These new results have been added to both Motion charts and Pinger Data explorer. Both of them are working fine.
  • Amber is working on creating smokeping plots for today's data.

HEC Report - Anjum, Amber and Imdad

The report is in Case studies at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PERN+Six+Monthly+Report+%28June+2011-+November+2011%29.

Imdadullah will be writing an executive summary of the report which needs to be submitted before the end of this month. Now the report goes to other universities as well as to the head of HEC. We now need to be very careful in writing the report.

The report was supposed to be submitted last monday. A few changes were made in the conclusions and an executive summary. We wait till next meeting for updates.

Pakistani Host

Joun and Ghulam have arranged to archive the status of Pakistani hosts in http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/daily-report. There is a link from the PingER web site (http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/site.html)

The IPs which start with 111.68.96.xxx are routed in such a way that the data can go out but it cannot come back to Pakistan. They will change the IP of all POP nodes. This arrangement was done for NCP. Only 0.5 MB of that link is provided to other universities. Any node that is having the IP as 111.68.96.xxx will be given a new IP.

There were 12 nodes with this problem which will be solved in the next week. SEECS will give them the IP addresses, and then HEC will change the IP of these nodes.

FSBD and MTN POP have high unreachability values. which is not acceptable. They are looking into it. Backhaul network is currently leased from PTCL however in 3-4 months they will replace it with their own network. There would be no commercial traffic on it. As a result it is expected that RTT and losses will improve drastically. So next 6 months are important for observing the network performance.

SEECS have not heard about the IP change from HEC. Dr Anjum will remind HEC about the IP changes to be made by the end of last week. We wait till nest week for updates.

PingER Archive Site - Ghulam 

Current Schema : see here.

Ghulam will modify the script to gather data half an hourly and put the analyze data in a separate table.

Sadia is working on getdata.pl to shift the data from SLAC files to database.

Future concerns:(Will be considered once  the performance of above monthly aggregated data is observed)

  1. How to store raw data for one year
  2. How should it be sharded
  3. For how long data should be in database

Sadia :Adding max RTT and Alpha to pingtable.pl and the analyze scripts 

TULIP - Bilal

Bilal will be delivering three tasks in this week ending 3/7/2012:

  1. Trying stress testing with reflector instead of reflex. Results are available at Target Data for reflector tier all. The results also have  a comparison of reflex and reflector error in terms of distance. Repeat this for Europe. 
  2. By the next week Bilal will be submitting report on Australia using reflex. He will also try reflector for Europe. Australia report using reflex can be found at: https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Stress+Testing+for+Australia
    1. Bilal needs to add the number of landmarks in the region for the EXcel Spreadsheet. This will be useful for his paper, i.e. reporting typical accuracy as a function of landmarks in region.
  3. Bilal will be sending the tulip draft paper by the end of February. 

It appears Sadia is right about SLAC needing to spend ~ $4K to get the full toolkit needed by CBG. Thus we will not implement at SLAC. Sadia will make sure TULIP art SLAC works for TULUP without CBG. Progress

Bilal will rerun the stress testing of North America using new reflex.

Bilal is writing a report with stress testing results of all of the regions. He will be sharing it when it completes.

With the upgrading of the pinger.slac.stanford.edu host from RHEL4  to RHEL6 the mysql databases got lost. Sadia has worked with Fahad to recover the Tulip data base from the recovered sites.xml file. This is almost done.

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. 
  • 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. Amber is looking at.

Future meeting time - Les

  1. Next meeting on Tuesday 13th March, 2012 at 8:00 pm in US and Wednesday 14th March, 2012 at 9:00am in Pakistan.
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