Minutes of SLAC SEECS Meeting May 15th, 2012
General
Did anybody notice the impact of the SEAMEW cable cut off Alexandria at about 12noon Pak time May 11th? Can anyone explain Les's results (see recent email).
No impact was noted by Amber, Sadia and Anjum.
Anjum believes he will have a student, Asad, to take over TULIP and include convert CBG from MatLab to Mathematica as their MS thesis. He will be joing us mid June, just after his exams.
SLAC has signed an MOU with the University of Malaysia in sarawak (near the capital Kuching). It is modeled on the general agreement we had with NUST. I just await the signed copy back from UNIMAS.
The Internet End-to-end Performance Monitoring, SLAC and Les as the Project Leader have been nominated for the Tech Awards in the Education category. Les has submitted PingER. Now we wait.
Anjum has applied for an HEC grant, also trying NUST to partially fund. Do not see a student at SLAC for 6 months and this may be optimistic. No progress yet.
Maggie is not working due to no disk space. This might be a reason for trace routes not working. Anjum suggests that deleting some of the files in the tmp folder will resolve the issue. Joun will be sending Les a list of the files in Maggie tmp folder, so that unnecessary files can be deleted.
IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam
Les has the passwords for monitor and the IPv6 host at SEECS. He has successfully logged on. When he tries to execute a traceroute to ipv6.google.com he gets:
Executing exec(traceroute6, -m 30 -q 3, 2404:6800:4009:800::1014, 140) traceroute to 2404:6800:4009:800::1014 (2404:6800:4009:800::1014), 30 hops max, 140 byte packets 1 2001:4538:101:3::14 (2001:4538:101:3::14) 3021.987 ms !H 3021.983 ms !H 3021.971 ms !H
Les is unclear if he should see an external (to SEECS) host and has sent email. He needs to retest, but has had no time. He made a mod to allow traceroute.pl to force IPv6 address
PingER Updates
Les fixed the To: field of pingtable.pl to enable the selection of a country it was not working. Les also modified ping_data_plot.pl to enable it to use other monitors than SLAC and to dynamically try and pick up the latest data from today. It can be reached by going to pingtable, then selecting the R|M|B in the ? column to get to the database information and then clicking on Time series plot of RTT & Loss last 4 days including today so far from PK.BUITMS.SEECS.EDU(buitms.seecs.edu.pk) to CH.CERN.N1(ping.cern.ch). It still needs some tweaking (the frequency distribution needs to also allow non SLAC monitor distributions, the form needs to only show the Beacons fro non SLAC monitors, better diagnostics for failures to getdata etc.)
HEC Report - Anjum, Amber and Imdad
Amber and Imadullah will prepare the report when Amber gets back to SEECS. Amber shall be writing the report for this month to be submitted to HEC and a one page summary to be submitted to SEECS. Imdad is leaving for PhD, so he will not be working on reports anymore.
Pakistani Hosts
There are some Pakistani nodes that are recorded as working from SEECS while they are not working from SLAC. This mismatch was recorded by Amber and Joun. Amber and Joun will get together and see if the problem still exists or not.
Les will check if there is a discrepancy in nodes not working from SLAC and nodes not working from SEECS.
FSBD 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.
PingER Archive Site - Ghulam
Current Schema : see [here|IEPM:Pinger+PerfSonar schema].
Sadia has partially implemented the new schema so now awaits finalization
Once the database at SEECS is ready then Joun can move the data. Ghulam needs to interact with Zafar or Umar. Umar will contact Zafar and see if he can spare sometime. Sadia will work with Ghulam to document his questions on the schema so Umar can work with Zafar to provide feedback. Ghulam has recovered from his illness, but had little to report, so Sadia has made little progress. Sadia might have to do this all on her own.
Future concerns:(Will be considered once the performance of above monthly aggregated data is observed) We await a working version before this can start.
- How to store raw data for one year
- How should it be sharded
- For how long data should be in database
- Ghulam thinks it will speed up our work if we remove the unused columns (metrics) of raw data from the pingtable. Only those fields will be left that are in perfsonar.
Ghulam will be submitting a document on what he did and what needs to be done in his work. Sadia will then review it.
Sadia proposed to hire another student tro complete the work of Bilal and Ghulam. Anjum says, after June he can choose an undergraduate student who can take this as his FYP project.
TULIP - Bilal
BS. Asia as a whole looks bad, Pakistan looks good (i.e. CBG is way better than GeoIP).
For South Asia, quest.seecs.edu.pk has high RTT and a distance of 816km for Islamabad nodes which is because the node is in Nawabshah Karachi but has the DNS entry of SEECS. Similarly, sbkwu.seecs.edu.pk has high error and large distance because the node is in Quetta but DNS entry is of SEECS. As Anjum can see, all the nodes that are showing bad results are the ones that have unstable behavior (i.e either they are unreachable most of the time or they have high RTTs).
Bilal needs to add the number of landmarks in the region for his Excel Spreadsheest. This will be useful for his paper, i.e. reporting typical accuracy as a function of landmarks in region.
Another interesting study would be whether using different alphas (in distance[km]=alpha*min_RTT[ms]*100[km/ms]) based on the alphas found in PingER for the various regions (see for examplehttp://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl?file=alpha&by=by-node&size=100&tick=daily&year=2012&month=03&from=United+States&to=United+States&ex=none&only=all&dataset=new&percentage=any) provides much benefit compared to the single current value of alpha. To facilitate this we have added PingER groups for N.AMERICA, EUROPE, AUSTRALASIA, S.ASIA, S.AMERICA.
Bilal will be sending the tulip draft paper before he leaves the job.
Bilal will be submitting a document on what he did and what needs to be done in his work. Sadia will then review it.
Bilal will rerun the stress testing of North America using new reflex. He has submitted it*. Did this happen or is it dead?*
Possible projects
- There can be a paper about Pinger if we could just find the right conference. MCN, ICC and Globecomm do provide network monitoring topics. It could talk of the various metrics and their importance (in particular; MOS, Alpha, max RTT, min RTT), the lessons learnt from running such a worldwide infrastructure, the uses of the data etc.
- 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 can add the impact of changing alpha. We can also indicate the importance of landmark proximity.
- 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.
Future meeting time - Les
Tentatively next meeting is on Tuesday 22nd May, 2012 at 8:00 pm in US and Wednesday 23rd May, 2012 at 8:00am in Pakistan. However, if we don't hear anything / don't get any document from Bilal and Ghulam then next meeting will be on Tuesday 12th June, 2012 at 8pm in US and Wednesday 13th June, 2012 at 8am in Pakistan.