Time & date
Wednesday May 22 2013 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday May 23 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday May 23 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:
Action Items from last meeting
- Les needs an invitation and funding so he can get started on travel. He has suggested flights etc.
- Is there a list of invitees?
- Has the notice been sent out to invitees?
- Is there a response?
- Johari was to put together ideas for an MoU between UM, UTM and UNIMAS.
- Badrul is putting together a funding proposal.
- The traceroute at UNIMAS needs further investigation - Johari
- Installing PingER on 2nd Raspberry Pie - Johari.
- We look forward to Badrul's student's work on the Malaysian Internet case study, can this be used as the basis for a paper on "User experience of using the Internet from Malaysian Universities
- Raja press forward with visa etc.
Workshop
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. Progress?
- The web page for promoting the upcoming PingER Workshop in UM is available from http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/workshop.php.
- Johari has created a list of invitees and will send to Abdullah and Hanan. Is the list available?
- The brochure is done. Has the call gone out to invitees?
- The Logistics and Labs have been agreed on. For the session on navigating the PingER site for data, it would be good to have 2 screens, 1 for a powerpoint presentation, the other for the worked exercises.
- The afternoon session on the second day is still is in flux. Ideas include putting together basis for a research proposal, how to collaborate with the private sector (e.g. MIMOS and MYREN), Bebo is willing to give a presentation on modern web techniques.
UM will cover Les' travel and accomodation costs. Les awaits the invitation from Abdullah, and decisions on who buys tickets and re-imbursement etc.
Following the meeting it is planned for Les to spend a day (on the 26th) at UM making a presentation and talking with staff and students. Following this it is planned that Les visits UTM in Johor Baru and repeat the above*. We need to sort out how to get from KL to JB.*
We are unable to get funding to invite someone from NUST. There are two plans to cover this*:*
- Anjum record his session of PingER deployment in Pakistan and lessons learned. This is presented as a video + Skype attendance by Anjum for questions. An alternative might be for the slides to be shown with Anjum narating by phone or Skype. - Thoughts Anjum?
- If the above does not work, then three talks:
- PingER in Malaysia initiative - Johari - 30 mins
- Case study of Internet connectivity within Malaysia together with anomalies - Badrul 30 minutes
- Routing within Malaysia - Saqib 30 mins
Invitations
University of Malaya will issue the invitation letter. Hanan had a meeting with Dr Abdullah and Johari at UM on the upcoming workshop on May 3rd 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.
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 besides UNIMAS.
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 has installed the PingER monitoring. He is seeing the same traceroute behavior.
UNIMAS has synchronized their list of Malaysian hosts with UM and UTM.
UTM
Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia.
Saqib contacted his network people to understand why the DNS resolution is so slow (10-15 secs each). Turns out there are 2 DNS servers at UTM. However one is down. this may cause timeout delays of the name resolution trys the down DNS server first. Saqib has disabled the down DNS server in the search order and that fixes the traceroute delays.
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 investigate the routing and where some of the routers are actually located.
UM
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, hosts with altage unreachability or losses etc. Progress?
NUST
UET Taxila University has a new IP address and GIKI University has an IP change and has been added as a monitoring node.
Raja has sent mail to the US embassy enquiring about the visa. he may need a new DS-2019 by the time the visa is issued.
PingER at SLAC
Several fixes and enhancements have been made to: ping_data_plot and frequency.pl to provide access to recent data via the web, improve scaling for lower RTTs, provide support for monitors other than pinger.slac.stanford.edu, added log scales by default, added display of distribution's statistical mode.
TULIP - Raja
Unlike MATLAB, Mathematica doesn't have as many builtin fuctions for spherical geometry calculations due to which he had to write those functions himself.
He has completed the Mathematica code and successfully called Mathematica through JAVA. Now he will try calling the JAVA code through PERL
He tried to get traceroutes from landmarks in India to landmarks in Pakistan using traceroute.pl but none of them responded. He will try to do this for other regions and see how that goes
Potential projects
Future meeting - Les
Next meeting Wednesday 5th June 2013 8:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday 6th June 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday 26the June 2013 11:00 am Malaysian time.