Time & date
Wednesday February March 26, 2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday March 27th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday March 27th, 2014 12:00 noon Malaysian time, Thursday March 27th, 2014 1:00am Rio Standard Time.
Attendees
Invitees:
Anjum+, Hassaan Khaliq+, Kashif?, Raja+, Johari+, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul, Ridzuan-, Ibrahim, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib, Les+, Renan-, Bebo-
+ Confirmed attendance
- Responded but Unable to attend:
Kashif will be in Faisalbad, and will try to attend.
Actual attendees:
Anjum, Hassaan, Raja, Saqib, Les
Administration
Hassaan has been added to the pinger-my email list.
- UUM are interested to host a PingER workshop at UUM in 2014. However, they have two issues, one is the budget (they need to run this workshop on cost recovery basis); second is their commitment to MYIGF which is hosted by UUM (btw 12-13 august). There was no update 3/5/2014. Adib was not on the 3/26/2014 meeting. Johari will try and contact Adib. It is not looking good for June/July time frame, maybe at the end of the year.
Renan
Renan realized that testing on Virtuoso is going to take longer than he thought because of the big number of triples. No response 3/25/2013.
Renan completed writing the paper on Linked Open data access to PingER data. Bebo & Les have reviewed and commented. It was submitted to the Stanford conference March 1st, 2014. The deadline for the submission was extended from March 1st to March 15. The notification is May 1st, the final submission is May 9th, conference is May 27-31. Poster submissions are due April 4th, we might submit a poster just in case. The acceptance rate is very low. Information on the conference is at http://www.scienceengineering.org/ase/conference/2014/bigdata/sanjose/website/paper-submission/.
The UFRJ host is successfully running again.
UM
Badrul plans for his undergraduate student (Abdulrahim Haroun Ali) to have a draft paper on anomalies in PingER measurements to share for review by the end of semester (January). No update 3/5/2014, 3/26/2014.
Ridzuan is studying a new version of Apache Hadoop 2.0 which is able to perform processing of big data (both streaming and batch processing). They are suggesting a new framework that will adopt selected new modules in Hadoop 2.0 to detect anomalies in Malaysia internet traffic. They'll come out with a proposal first and will share it when it is ready.
Ibrahim Abaker is planning to work on a topic initially entitled " leveraging pingER big data with a modified pingtable for event-correlation and clustering". Bebo & Les had a Skype meeting with Renan and Ibrahim to get an update and set up direct contact between Renan and Ibrahim. Ibrahim provided a copy of his proposal (see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17162/leveraging%20pingER%20big%20data%20with%20a%20modified%20pingtable%20for%20event-correlation%20and%20clustering.docx).
UNIMAS
No progress 2/19/2014. Johari was not on the call 3/5/2014.
The Raspberry Pi is at the data centre and has a public IP address. The private IP address works but not the public. Johari will pursue.
The tool to enable synchronizing Malaysian monitors is completed. It provides the ability to add, edit and delete nodes in the HostList. Raja has tested and after a mod was made to replace a private IP address it is working well. Johari provided information to Saqib on trying it out. Saqib successfully used tool and updated it. Johari will add an account for Badrul to use it. Saqib requested to add sorting the HostList by country, Johari will add this.
The traceroute server at http://pinger2.unimas.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl has the same problem as before. They know (sort of) the problem but haven't got the chance to rectify it (mapping NAT address, needs to be added). There is no progress 12/4/2013, 1/8/2013, 1.22.2014, 2/5/2014, 3/26/2014. Now that the historical traceroutes are working for UM (see below) there is an extra incentive to get the reverse traceroute working at UTM and UNIMAS
Johari has a research student who finalized a proposal in order to officially apply for his masters. He will start in February. He is currently working on threshold/anomaly detection, and will extend to correlating performance over multiple routes. He will share the proposal with Les and others April.
UTM
Saqib has received an official letter regarding the successful selection of research assistant-ship at UTM.
Saqib submitted an FRGS 2014 proposal ("A Fundamental Active Internet Performance Monitoring Framework for Malaysian Research & Education Network") for 36 months. Proposes to submit another in ERGS or E-Science grants. He is in discussions with his PhD. superviser to get the requirements.
The new historical traceroute facility makes it important to get the traceroute server workling at UTM. No progress 3/26/2014.
Saqib has started a case study of Malaysian hosts seen from Malaysian Monitors. He has updated the remote host list on UTM Pinger (Malaysian & S.E Asia) and remote host xml tool. In the next two weeks, he will finish the case study of Malaysian hosts seen from Malaysian Monitors.
UTM pinger server is now running with an updated version of pinger.xml file using the tool provided by Dr. Johari. Saqib has updated the data on remote host management page with all S.E Asia nodes. Now UM and UNIMAS can synchronize their host list. The list is available here.
UUM
Update requested on the status of the PingER host at UUM, 3/21/2014, 3/24/2014. No response.
NUST
Kashif returns next week. Joun leaves soon for Saudi Arabia. Anjum will request Arshad to get a replacement, he is unsure if one will be forthcoming. In any case for some time there will only be Kashif at SEECS supporting PingER.
The PingER monitor at SEECS/NUST (maggie1) is being rebuilt on a different computer following a crash.
They could not get the database password from anyone. However as a last option they cracked and made a dump of the database for backup. That machine (maggie1) is still infected and it is not possible to make it UP at its present state. Since Joun is leaving this job (family shifted to Saudi arabia) so the process of its trouble shooting will resume as Kashif returns to Islamabad.
As an alternate solution they prepared another machine as a monitoring node and gave it the IP & DNS of maggie1. Also they installed the Beacon list file in it at the required path which is accessible and downloadable from other monitoring nodes. With that, now nodes are being UP again one by one, by updating Beacon list from new maggie1 machine. So at least SLAC can ping and have data of Pakistani Monitoring Nodes in its database.
The BeaconLists at NUST and SLAC are out of sync. Raja compared the two pinger.xml files. It turns out NUST was not using the HostList for the non Beacons and so Pakistani monitors have an expanded BeaconList which was updated from SEECS. Raja has explained this to NUST and believe it will be easy to synchronize. Kashif asked about the definition of Beacons. Les updated the web page at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/beacon.html. Hopefully this helps. However, Anjum pointed out that due to restrictions imposed at the at the PERN PoPs (limit number of hosts monitored, do not allow monitoring of non Pakistani hosts, do not provide full access permissions to the monitor) they cannot use the standard SLAC based beacon list. Anjum will talk to Arshad. Maybe the PERN PoPs should use a different Beacon list kept at SEECS.
Hassaan reports that they have established contact with people in Bahawalpur. The contact person forwarded the request to higher authorities for approval of PingER deployment. Bahawalpur are not responding. When Kashif returns SEECS will try again. Anjum has some contacts from Bahawalpur at UM who may be able to help. He will contact them before Monday.
The installation of PingER at Sahiwal is complete. It just needs the Beacon List. This awaits Kashif's return.
Quest.seecs.edu.pk has been restored to a working state
We are unable to gather data from airuniversity, buitms, cae, duhs, kohat, lcwu, pingerfsbd, pingerisl-qau, sau.seecs.edu.pk , uaf.
Monitors Status
Airuniversity New installation will be install in a week
Buitms Problem in hardware, they are trying to fix it. System Replacement Required
Cae Problem with IP, they are trying to resolve it
Duhs They are purchasing new servers in two week time
Pingerisl-qau Contact person is still on leave. He is now busy in other pending works.
sau.seecs.edu.pk for all of January. Contact person is not attending
Uaf Problem in system, visit approval for Faisalabad University in progress. Approved for 12th Feb
Anjum pointed out that there are working PingER monitors that SLAC appears unable to gather data from. An example is the Comsats host. Les discovered that SELInux needed to be disabled. it is working now.
TULIP - Raja
Raja has added the ability to insert a captured traceroute into VTrace to get its route visualized. Try it at http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/reflector.cgi?function=vtrace. We are looking to add a link to it from the perfSONAR home page.
Raja, Umar and Les are working on a paper on TULIP and its application to Visual Tracerouting to be submitted later this year
We have sent a reminder email to Yahoo giving them an update on TULIP and how it might be extended to meet their needs. They have responded, they appear to be interested. We are trying to interest them in providing landmarks. No update 2/18/2013, 3/26/2014.
PingER at SLAC
Raja has also re-written the historical traceroute facility that takes nightly traceroutes and allows one to retrieve and compare them. He then extended it to use the reverse traceroute facility to provide histories for NUST, CERN, UM as well as SLAC. When the UNIMAS and UTM traceroutes work, we can include them. See for example http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/traceroutearchive.cgi
The PingER monitoring host at ICTP has been restored to a working state. It had run out of file space. We improved pinger2.pl to detect lack of file space. Les contacted the Jordanian PingER monitor (it did not ping) contact to restore it on 3/7/2014 and again 3/22/2014, it has been fixed.
Old Items
Linked Open Data
Renan 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. The new version has been loaded on the server and some text added to describe how to use the map. However there is a bug that prevents it from executing the map. Renan reports that the bugs should be easy to fix. He has talked to his professor who suggested trying RDF Owlink, it should have faster responses to queries. Renan will research this. It will probably mean reloading the PingER data so is a lot of work, hopefully this will improve performance. Before the rebuild he will make the fixes and provide a new WAR for us to load on pingerlod.slac.stanford.edu. He is also working on documentation (he has finished the ontology and has a nice interactive tool for visualizing it, 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) and his thesis. Bebo pointed out that to get publicity and for people to know about the data, we will need to add pingerlod to lod.org.
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.
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.
Renan is using OWLIM as RDF Repository. He is using an evaluation version right now. Renan looked into the price for OWLIM (that excellent RDF Database Management System he told us about). It would cost 1200EUR minimum (~ 1620 USD, according to Google's rate for today) for a one time eternal license. It seems too expensive. No wonder it is so good. Anyhow, he heard about a different free alternative. Just not sure how good it would be for our PingER data. He will try it out and evaluate. He will also get a new evaluation of the free OWLIM lite.
He has also made some modifications on the ontology of the project (under supervision of his professor in Rio) hence he will have to modify the code to load the data accordingly.
Renan has provided a 4 page Appendix on PingERLOD to the ICFA report. This is also available at PingER LOD Overview
Raspberry Pi
A quick comparison of the performance of the two hosts (raspberry pi and regular UNIMAS host) without statistical quantification is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY. A page has been created to compare the hardware spec between the pinger.unimas.my node (Intel architecture) and the pinger2.unimas.my node (Raspberry Pi ARM architecture), available from the unimas pinger website at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/hardware.php. There is a link to hardware.php in the Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY web page.
NUST
At the Connect Asia Pacific Summit in Bangkok in January and seeing the project "Mapping the pan Asia Pacific information Superhighway and closing gaps in infrastructure connectivity" Shahryar found that very much related to the work in the PingER project. So Shahryar sent email to a UN agency for a possible collaboration with them on PingER project. He has heard nothing so he will write a detailed proposal and then should contact them again. No update 2/5/2014, 3/5/2014.
Tulip
Follow up from workshop
- 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 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.
Potential projects
Future meeting - Les
Next meeting Wednesday April 9th 2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday April 10th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday April 10th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday April 10th, 2014 02:00am Rio Standard Time.