Attendees
Anjum, Kashif, Les. Raja presented apologies but is unable to attend. Joun and Umar were also not present.
General
Arshad has put together a letter from the NUST Rector to the VC of UM (or is it UTM) in Kuala Lumpur concerning a collaboration of Pakistan, Malaysia and SLAC. This has been sent.
UNIMAS is starting to monitor other Malaysian hosts outside the regular Beacons. There is a problem with adding the non Beacon hosts. The pinger.xml file seems to keep getting replaced with an old copy. If pinger2.pl is disabled then it does not happen. Anjum believes it may be caused by an older version of pinger2.pl. This has been passed on to UNIMAS. If UNIMAS would like some help then Joun could assist if he is provided a login account. Joun is very experienced in PingER monitor installations having done many in Pakistan. Les has sent email to UNIMAS. They (Johari) appear to look forward to working with Joun and are willing to set up an account.
UNIMAS are looking at whether they can fund the NUST people for a workshop in December at UNIMAS in Sarawak. There is no word on this, Les has sent email to UNIMAS to get an update.
From Arshad: Rector has agreed to support one person visit to SLAC. Pl select the best candidate. Arshad is away in either the UK or Korea. When he returns Anjum will get more information. It could be 6 months or a year, and will probably be Kashif.
A monitoring host hase been configured and sent to Faisalabad. They planned to have it up late last week. There is an issue of live IP they only have 16 IPs so lthey ooking to free one up. Have planned to visit FSBD on 24th Oct and have funding for trip.
HEC Report - Anjum, Amber and Imdad
Kashif posted the September report to http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/monthly-report/HEC%20Report%20September2012.pdf . It has been completed for September and sent to HEC.
Pakistani Hosts
FSBD POP is working much more stably, see below. We believe they must have replaced the backhaul network with their own network with no commercial traffic on it. WE do not know what was done to fix things up, Anjum has a guess.
Pakistani monitors: good=41, no_data=5, partial_data=3, problems=6, total=47. Last week Pingerpwr has an IP address issue (they need to change their address). HEC is working on it. PIEAS and IIU have new installations in progress. SAU is in the midst of a strike.
RTT values from HEC-Lahore to HEC-Quetta are very high since 15th September 2012, i.e. went from ~35ms to ~150ms To analyze this anomaly Kashif ran the traceroute from HEC-Lahore to HEC-Quetta and also compared it with the traceroute from HEC-Lahore to HEC-Karachi. Up to 05 hops the route is same and afterward the routes are entirely different. At hop number 05 Transworld Pakistan route the packet to an IP in France (Values got from: http://whatismyipaddress.com) and then packets come back to Pakistan at hop number 10 which is the reason for the higher RTT. Whereas in the comparative traceroute from HEC-Lahore to HEC-Karachi the values are fine. Therefore this issue need to be investigate at HEC-Islamabad level that why Transworld is routing the Quetta packets to outside pakistan resulting in higher RTT. This issue is same for HEC-Lahore to BUITMS-Quetta which implies every packet from HEC-Lahore to Quetta Region is going outside pakistan. This was reported by Anjum to HEC who said "Issue has been resolved. Previously traffic was following the path of our secondary service provider which was the reason of higher RTT value. We are still working with our secondary service provider i.e TW1 to resolve this issue. Meanwhile your traffic has been shifted to our primary link." We will need to continue to monitor the pair. It appeared like this on Friday 10/17/2012.It would be good for Kashif to put together a short case study which would become part of the report to the HEC for October. 
Kashif has sent a report to Anjum whowho sent it to HEC who fixed the problem. Kashif has put together a case study. Les is having problems on his laptop reading the PDF. Kashif will send a word document.
It would have assisted to have had a log of traceroutes. Anjum will contact Zafar who was working on this. This was completed for SLAC but we need it for SEECS PERN POP hosts.
The problem is snce tere is no IXP in Pakistan so the peering is done abroad. Anwar (of HEC) would like NUST to put together a meeting to look at providing a neutral point for an IXP for PTCL, SuperNet and WorldCom. If the IXP is at HEC then it will need to upgrade all its links to PERN-II so it can carry the extra traffic. If this is funded it could take 4-6 months.
Non Pakistani Hosts
Sri Lanka is OK again the node namunu will be replaced by hunnas (it is running freeBSD and needs https). We are currently gathering data from both. SDSC is down they are rebuilding their PingER server. pinger.cdacmumbai.in is down for about 5 days. sitka.triumf.ca is back up. The UERJ host lost its hard disk, it is being replaced. Also cc.if.ufrj.br and pinger.arn.dz have been down for 7 days. UNIMAS is down see above concerning the pinger.xml problem.
TULIP
Raja was unable to be present so there is no update on this item. Anjum will request Raja for an update.
Raja understands the CGI code in Matlab.. He is working on the MatLab version to add a lookup table to allow the choice of Alpha to be based on region and min RTT. When he has this working he will work on porting from MatLab to Mathematica.
It may also make sense to look at using a modified outer circle. I.e. instead of distance (radius in km)= 100km/ms*min_RTT(ms), use distances(radius in km)=alpha_max*100km/mx*min_RTT(ms) where alpha_max is the maximum alpha for landmarks to target in a given region.
Statistica analysis of Alpha
Raja agreed to provide a written write up of what he found out by analyzing alpha for various regions.
Future meeting time - Les
Following this I will be in Kenya starting October 19th thru November 3rd. So I propose the next meeting to be Wednesday November 7th at 8:00pm. Pacific time and Thursday November 8th at 9:00am Pakistani time. Note the change of time in Pakistan due to the end of daylight time in the US .on Sunday November 4th. This change in time will help Joun but hinder Raja.