Time & date
Wednesday September 18, 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday September 19 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday September 11:00am Malaysian time.
Attendees
Invitees: Anjum, Kashif, Raja+, Johari+, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul-, Hanan, Saqib, Adib, Les+, Renan+, Bebo-
+ Confirmed attendance
- Responded but Unable to attend
- Actual attendees: Anjum, Raja, Johari, Les, Renan
Administration
- Rafidah Md Noor has too many administrative duties and will not be joining the group.
- We will add Adib of UUM and Renan to the pinger-my mailing list. Has this has been done? - Badrul
- Ridzuan has not decided whether to join.
- Do we need to add anyone else to the weekly meetings, e.g. Hossein Javedani of UTM (or maybe Saqib or Hanan can cover for him).
- Badrul is unable to make it to this time due to lecturing. Unclear if anyone else from UM will cover for him. Can we move to accomodate Badrul? For the attendees at this meeting, we could move to a Tuesday Pacific Time slot. Whether this would help Badrul is unknown. The change from daylight time is coming up on November 3rd. This will make 8pm PDT = 9am Pakistan time, noon Malaysian time and stay at midnight Brazilian time (they also are coming off daylight saving time). Anjum has a 9:00am lecture on Wednesday and a 10:00am on Thursday and Friday.
Funding/Proposals
Johari is looking for a Research Assistant for 24 months for his research grant. If he has no success he will see if he can do something with NUST. He has an undergraduate who is looking at Geoflow to make better visualizations of PingER. Geoflow will be released end of this year, early next year. It requires Excel. Johari is doubtful the student will complete this.
Badrul has received the grant from his proposal. It amounts to 46K RM. It will pay travel for Johari and Adib plus a Malaysian research assistant at UM.
We discussed sending undergraduate student to study for a few months (like Renan did) for example at SLAC. It is regarded as a great ideato give exposure etc. but funding will be hard. There are exchange programs with RMIT in Australia and the University of Warwick in the UK. NUST has exchange students. The students have to pay their own travel.
Renan
Renan has just finished the new pingerlod web site. The new thing is that it should be much easier now to modify the info texts. What Renan did was to put the texts into a separate file. It should be able to be easily edit this file without requiring a new war file to be installed on the server. Les has contacted the Apache server administrator to request uploading of the new war file. The admin is in the UK at the moment so there will be a delay. Once we have that we can easily modify the text to go with the web site. Renan needs to document this.
Renan is writing his thesis paper. Right now, he is writing a Glossary and Taxonomy of all terms used in the Ontology. Later, he will document the ontology (not only the definition of the terms but also their relationship with each other and their properties). Since the ontology is the core of the data model of our semantic solution, this will be very helpful for anyone who uses our system; both a developer of the system and a possible user. He will think of a good way to upload this stuff as a documentation for our Wiki on Confluence.
Things he will soon do regarding documentation:
- A task/process flow writing all java classes involved on all those batch jobs;
- A Javadoc <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-jsp-135444.html> which will explain all classes and how they are used.
UNIMAS
Johari has moved the raspberry pie to the UNIMAS Computer Center (CC). He still needs a public DNS for his Raspberry Pie. Johari will follow up with the CC. Johari believes the traceroute problem is with the Network Address Translation. He will talk to the CC about adding support to the NAT to enable traceroute.
The unit has an 8GByte SDK card. Johari plans to clean out older cached measured data at regular intervals. The actual intervals will be based on the fill rate.
Johari is having problems creating an ISO image to simplify distribution using Ubuntu. he will try another linux version.
UTM
Saqib has finished with his thesis. Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia. In particular hosts which are unreliable, hosts with large (>1) values of Directivity, host with large RTTs, hosts with large unreachability or losses etc. Les had some questions on the locations of some sites that have impossible values of Directivity. One has been Disabled, any word on Allianze? What about QIUP? Saqib will investigate. Saqib was not on the call so no update.
Hossein Javedani of UTM was interested in anomaly detection in PingER data. We have sent him a couple of papers and how to access the PingER data. Any update - Hanan, Saqib?
Saqib is preparing a paper on event correlation.
Johari pointed out Saqib is a PhD student. Johari will talk to Hanan about getting a staff member to represent PingER at UTM.
UM
Abdullah and Badrul met to discuss looking at data mining PingER data for PhD studies., however the PhD student withdrew from the project.
- Badrul has been looking at anomalies in ping measurements. Les sent some pointers to previous work on anomaly detection in time series. The student returned September 4th.
- MD NOR RIDZUAN BIN DAUD of UM is interested in analytics with Big Data for PingER. Renan has sent documentation and is in contact with Md. Md plans to to look at analytics of clustering correlation in PingER data. He will get the data from pingtable.pl. He will try a small amount of data first and extend to more data later. Seehttps://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+Big+Data+Analytics+proposal.
Badrul was not on the call so no updates.
NUST
TULIP - Raja
Raja has re-worked the CBG to work in perl. This will dramatically simplify deployment.
Raja has looked at perfSONAR. He has found ~ 50 potential landmarks with lat/longs and has added to the mysql database. He has also understood the TULIP database and is updating. He has fixed a bug with accessing the PlanetLabs landmarks. He has revived the laundering: if a host is < 20% successful then it is Disabled, if > 30% successful and disabled, it is Enabled.
The www-wanmon web server problems caused by deploying IPv6 have been fixed.
PingER at SLAC
- Working to get Daffodil University in Bangaldesh started with monitoring. The traceroute server is running and the ping_data.pl form works but no data is returned.
- Working with Bangladesh to set up a monitoring site at Jahangirnagar University Dhakar. Letter of invitation has been sent. Les requested an update from Bangladesh 8/13/2013. They responded that they are having a delay getting an IP address. Sent email with reminder for an update 9/17/2013.
- We are also working with MIMOS (see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/20130810+Meeting+with+Dickson+Lukose+of+MIMOS) to get hosts and landmarks. They are in the midst of a discussion. Hope to have something to report by September 8th. Sent email reminder 9/17/2013.
- Manipal are in the phase of stabilizing the IT infra at MIU, They will not be able to deploy this tool at our campus this time.
- Adib of UUM reported on 8/22/2013 that he has discussed the PingER project with Prof.Suhaidi “the chairman of InterNetWorks Research Lab”; he is interested and ready to support. Now, they are waiting the requirements of UUM computer centre before they can officially join Pinger team. Is there an update, Adib was not on the last call. Sent email reminders 9/7/2013 and 9/17/2013.
- On 8/27/2013, Bebo, Les and Renan met with Zakaria Maamar of Zayed university of Dubai to get monitoring hosts and landmarks. Zayed university has a campus in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi. Zakaria is not a networker but is happy to help out. He will discuss with the Dean and get approval of upper administration. He expects a positive response. If this fails he will direct us to some private universities. We pointed out he may be interested in Renan's work making PingER data available via Open Link data.
Zakaria responded 9/17/2013 that the Dean and Zakaria were reluctant to approach the upper administration after some internal discussions. They have a new upper administration that has been so far sending mixed messages on different topics. However he copied Prof. Wathiq Mansoor on the email, he is with American University of Dubai. He might help out. Wathiq responded with interest, have sent him information (basically http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/letters/invite-monitor.doc).
Old Items
For the Linked Open Data / RDF which is in pre-alpha days, you can go to http://pingerlod.slac.stanford.edu. As can be seen this page is not ready for prime time. However the demos work as long as one carefully elects what to look at:
- Click on Visualizations, there are two choices:
- Multiple Network Metrics: Click on the image: gives a form, choose from Node pinger.slac.stanford.edu pinging to www.ihep.ac.cn, time parameters yearly, 2006 2012, metrics throughput, Average RTT Packet loss and display format Plot graph, then click on submit. In a few seconds time series graph should come up. Mouse over to see details of values at each x value (year).
- A mashup of network metrics x university metrics Click on image: gives another form, pinging from pinger.slac.stanford.edu, School metric number of students, time metric years 2006 2012, display format plot graph, click on submit. Longer wait, after about 35 seconds a google map should show up. Click on "Click for help." Area of dots = number of students, darkness of dots = throughput (lighter is better), inscribing circle color gives university type (public, private etc.) Click on circle for information on university etc.
- Renan will be working on providing documentation on the programs, in particular the install guide for the repository and web site etc. This will assist the person who takes this over.
Follow up from workshop
- Adib of UUM also interested in porting PingER to support IPv6.
- Anjum reported that SEECS started on this. They were thinking of using the IPv6 address, then using it to get the IPv4 address and rewriting the ping measurement with the IPv4 address, then everything in the analysis stays as it was. An alternative might be to get rid of the IP addresses altogether. Anjum reached out to Adib.
- Hossein Javedani of UTM is interested in anomalous event detection with PingER data. Information on this is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Event+Detection. We have sent him a couple of papers and how to access the PingER data. Hossein and Badrul have been put in contact. Is there an update Badrul?
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 herehttps://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.
There was interest in TULIP from Mridul Jain <mridul@yahoo-inc.com>and the Senior Architect in Yahoo! R&D Software Dev in Bangalore, India. He pointed to an interesting paper on Geolocation using CBG and then finding hosts in the area and getting their area codes and using a virtual landmarks making traceroutes. The paper is at https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yong.pdf. He wants something to use in production, however I do not think we are ready.
Potential projects
Future meeting - Les
Next meeting Wednesday 2 October 2013 8:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday 3 October 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday 3 October 2013 11:00 am Malaysian time.