Time & date
Wednesday April 24 2013 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday April 25 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday April 25 2013 11:00am Malaysian time.
Attendees
Invitees: Anjum*, Kashif-, Johari*, Nara, Abdullah-, Badrul, Hanan, Fidah, Saqib*, Les*, Raja-, Umar and Bebo-
* Confirmed attendance
- Unable to attend
Actual attendees: Abdullah, Anjum, Johari, Saqib, Badrul, Les
Action Items from last meeting
- We await official approval of the workshop so we can proceed with invites.
- Johari is waiting to hear from Nara on funding someone from NUS for the workshop. This is very important.
- If there is to be an MoU signing ceremony between UM, UTM and UNIMAS, then an MoU will need to be drawn up.
- Hanan, Johari and Abdullah need to meet
- Johari found a bug in HostSearcher.pl, it needs fixing. Les has fixed it since the meeting.
- Badrul is putting together a funding proposal.
- The traceroute at UNIMAS needs further investigation.
- There are some suggestions for Saqib to try on the trace route at UTM. There has been considerable progress in understanding the timing (see below)
- We look forward to Badrul's student's work on the Malaysian Internet case study
- Anjum can you resend the proposal. Anjum resent the proposal, Les reviewed and responded
- Raja press forward with visa etc.
Pass down
- PingER project data on the health of Africa’s Internet networks – oAfrica, see http://www.oafrica.com/broadband/pinger-project-data-on-the-health-of-africas-internet-networks/
- Visualization of PingER data using Microsoft/Excel/Geoflow see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/geoflow_data_viz-041113.aspx , see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects.
Workshop
It will be 25-26 June at the University of Malaya. There is a document. Abdullah has approval.
Les believes, and sent email to Abdullah stating, that it is critically important to have someone from NUST at the workshop. Johari has forwarded a request to Nara. Nara reports he does not have funding, he is looking for an alternative source.
Johari suggested a signing ceremony at the workshop for an MoU between UM, UTM and UNIMAS. Johari will work on putting together ideas for an MoU.
Bebo is happy to join the conference by teleconferencing especially during the 2nd day wrap up sessions.
Invitations
University of Malaya will issue the invitation letter. Hanan will have a meeting with Dr Abdullah and Johari at UM on the upcoming workshop on May 3rd in KL to settle the invitation list.
For attendees it is important to try and get 2 representatives from each of the 20 public Malaysian universities. It would also be good to get a non MYREN University and someone from Malaysia Telecom. Bebo has sent contacts for MIMOS and Manipal. One participant would be from the computer division (more to do with installing and maintaining), the other from Faculty (more for the research side). Johari said there is space for 30. Anjum said we should invite more than 30 since there will be some who will not attend. We could go >30 people for the non technical sessions and restrict for the hands on.
Finding sites to monitor
It is not easy to find pingable sites in some Malaysian states. Obvious targets are universities, for example UUM in Kedah and UNIMAP in Perlis, but those sites are not ping-able. Also some of the existing hosts are not at the Universities we thought them to be at. An approach is to invite such sites to the workshop and explain to them what we are doing. Johari is using HostSearcher.pl to look for hosts. There are plenty in KL and Penang but elsewhere it becomes hard to find suitable hosts.
Funding/Proposals
Johari reported that the FRGS proposal had been accepted. It is for 75K MRs (~$35K). It is for 5 people. It is not available until June and so cannot be used for the Workshop.
Badrul is putting together a proposal fro an outreach program. It is similar to Johari's FRGS proposal. It will be used to expand the monitoring hosts. There is no progress (4/24/2013), Badrul is looking for another collaborator.
Johari said a second round has been opened up for FRGS funding. Johari will share thsi with others at the meeting in KL in May. If a proposal is put together from multi-universities (e.g. 2 from each of UM, UTM and UNIMAS) then the acceptance probability is high. Also includes SLAC and NUST.
The Next step in funding is to go for bigger research funding, such as LRGS or eScience. Such proposals must lead to publications in high quality journals. They will need an infrastructure such as the one we are building. We can use the upcoming workshop (1 specific session) to brainstorm and come up with such proposal. We need to do some groundwork before that as well. Johari will take the lead in putting together 1/2 page descriptions of the potential research projects.
- Need to identify a few key areas of research related to PingER Malaysia Initiative and this can be shared/publicized through the website. These might include using the infrastructure and data for: anomaly detection; correlation of performance across multiple routes; and for GeoLocation. Future projects as Les listed in Confluence here https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects can also be a good start and also Bebo's suggestion.
- Need to synchronize and share research proposals so as not to duplicate research works. how to share? Maybe not through the website, or maybe can create a member only section of the website to share sensitive data such as research proposal?
Anjum mentioned a paper on Evaluation of IP Geolocation Algorithms on PingER and PlanetLab Infrastructures, by Fida Gilani et. al. submitted to IEEE INFOCOM 2011. This could be updated with new data and maybe submitted to a different venue. Anjum forwarded a copy of the paper to Johari, Abdullah and Hanan with copies to the team. The idea is to see whether there is interest at UTM, UM or UNIMAS.
Anjum suggested Saqib, Badrul and Johari put together a paper on user experiences with using the Internet in Malaysia as seen from Malaysian universities. In particular round trip time, losses, jitter, reliability, routing/peering, in particular anomalies, and the impact on VoIP, throughput etc. It would be good to engage someone from MYREN.
UNIMAS
There is a problem with the UNIMAS traceroute. It appears both in pinger.unimas.my and in the Raspberry. It appears pinger.unimas.my is behind a NAT that is not passing the traceroute UDP probes. Other hosts at UNIMAS are not seeing the problem, so Johari believes it may have to do with the IPTABLES in pinger.unimas.my. Traceroute using the -I option (send the probes using ICMP rather than UDP) seems to work (but needs root access). Thus it would appear not to be in the return (ICMP "time exceeded") response. The probes (when not using the -I option are UDP packets using sequentially ports 33434 - 33465 for up to 30 hops). It is possible that ports > some number may be blocked. Johari talked to Imran of the UNIMAS Computation Center to discuss the IP address configuration mismatch on private and public addresses. No progress 4/24/2013.
Johari has another Raspberry Pie. he will install the PingER monitoring and see how it compares with the pinger.unimas.my.
UTM
Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia.
There was a long discussion on traceroute from UTM at the last PingER collaboration meeting. It is peculiar that a traceroute from UTM to www.unimas.my when used with a time out after 45 seconds just gets the first 4 hops. Saqib made measurements that eliminated the cause as being the time of day of the measurements. Further measurements and analysis indicated the cause is name resolution taking between 9 and 15 second per hop address to name resolution. There is a document at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Traceroute+from+UTM. Saqib is running Linux 2.6 so it is possible we could use parallel probes to help speed up. However, we should find out why name resolution is so slow. Les will look at how to enable passing other options (such as -A, -w 6 and -N squeries) to traceroute.pl
There is also a problem of the traceroute from UTM to UM going via Europe. Badrul has contacts at MYREN and will use them to investiate the routing and where some of the routers are actually located.
UM
Since the traceroute is working, "we" can start to make a routing study similar to https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Routing+from+UNIMAS. Badrul has a student who will be working on the case study and will coordinate with Saqib at UTM and Johari at UNIMAS to combine results and to put together a paper for the Malaysian ISI Journal probably around the end of June. There was no progress reported on this. Badrul has been looking at anomalies in ping measurements. In particular hosts which are unreliable, hosts with large (>1) values of Directivity, host with large RTTs or losses etc.
NUST
Raja received his DS-2019 documents from SLAC. He has had his visa interview at the US Embassy and awaits processing.
Abdullah visited Islamabad, he was invited by Anjum to also visit NUST.
Les has responded with comments to a proposal to HEC from NUST. This has been submitted to the HEC. it is based on more application level probles using TCP
Gathering data from several hosts in Pakistan is impeded by the power outages, such that the monitor is unreachable between 0:30 and 3:30am (SLAC) time many mornings when the cronjob to gather the data is run. The data gathering has been successfully re-run manually.
PingER at SLAC
Les has been invited to give a general colloquiam at SLAC on May 6th on the the "Emergence of the Internet and Africa". This will include some PingER case studies and measurements.
A graduate student from Brazil will be joining PingER at SLAC for 12 weeks in late May, 2013. He will probably work on web front ends. He has been sent his invitation.
The bug in http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/connectivity.pl?monitor=pinger.fsktm.um.edu.my&rawdata=www.aiu.edu.my&format=tsv& has been fixed.
Bug in HostSearcher.pl has been by-passed.
TULIP
Raja has written most of the CBG code in mathematica (and also included his variable alpha part). He needs to figure out how to call mathematica script the way we call the MATLAB script at runtime since that would be needed if it is to used on the server. he is working on organizing the code better by making use of Mathematica packages (similar to functions of matlab). Zafar made some suggestions:
You could call Mathematica from Java and call the Java program from a Perl script.
Writing Java programs that use Mathematica:
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/JLink/tutorial/WritingJavaProgramsThatUseMathematica.html
Calling Mathematica from Java:
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/JLink/guide/CallingMathematicaFromJava.html
Call Java from Perl:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3100068/call-a-java-class-from-perl
Raja has completed converting CGG the MATLAB script to Mathematica and used it to generate some input files for Pakistan and Europe. However using the alpha values (function of both region and RTT value) found through the alpha analysis the distances were underestimates in some cases. He is working on finding the cause and possible solution. Did you get an answer?
Potential projects
Future meeting - Les
Next meeting Wednesday 8th May 2013 8:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday 9th May 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday 9th May 2013 11:00 am Malaysian time.