Time & date
Wednesday February April 9, 2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday April 10th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday April 10th, 2014 12:00 noon Malaysian time, Thursday April 10th, 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:
Actual attendees:
Hassaan, Kashif, Raja, Abdullah, Ibrahim, Saqib, Les
Administration
Adib has contacted his colleague (Dr. Nordin: chair of ISTT2014) to discuss the possibility of slotting our workshop in to the ISTT2014. The conference will be held in Langkawi between 24-26 Nov. The conference is 2 days so the workshop may be squeezed to one day.
Adib received draft for workshop from Johari 4/9/2014.
Hopefully, this will help us to attract good number of participants and get sponsor/support to cover our expenditure. Other option is to conduct the workshop in UUM, we are ready to provide Local Arrangement (lab, local transportation, and food). But there is no funding provided by the school to support the transportation/accommodation of the speakers.
Renan
Renan submitted a Paper before March 15. We are waiting for May 1st to check whether or not we will be accepted. We decided against submitting a poster by April 4th. If we don't get accepted, we could submit the paper (with some adjustments) to another conference, if you know about any other one
Renan believes we should invest more time on Virtuoso. He just cannot work on this at this moment because he knows it will take him some time to correctly migrate the data and perform more experiments; and unfortunately he has no extra time to do this.
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). The student returned to his country and Badrul awaits the paper.
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". Ibrahim has a proposal, see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17162/leveraging%20pingER%20big%20data%20with%20a%20modified%20pingtable%20for%20event-correlation%20and%20clustering.docx. He is currently spending time reading about RDF storage and its retrieval, also he is trying to setup Hadoop clusters for the experiment. He is in email discussion with Renan on which part to work on first. He plans to collaborate with Renan to make the pinger store and process more efficient. Les has sent him documentation of PinGER which is very helpful. Ridzuans' work is more to do with hosting the data and stream data analysis. Ibrahim is looking more at applying MapReduce ( programming model for processing large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster), reducing the storage needs and providing querying of the data.
UNIMAS
The Raspberry Pi is at the data centre and has a public IP address. The private IP address works but not the public. Johari reports no progress 4/8/2014.
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, 4/8/2014. 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 received feedback on the submitted FRGS 2014 proposal ("A Fundamental Active Internet Performance Monitoring Framework for Malaysian Research & Education Network") for 36 months. He will update it and re-submit. He proposes to submit another in ERGS or E-Science grants. He is in discussions with his PhD. superviser to get the requirements and has started on the proposal.
Saqib is seeing some unexplainable results from the traceroute servers at UTM. Basically traceroute from UTM works fine with -I option. Otherwise it stop at hops 10 or 11 unless he uses the -f 6 option. He will document and then we will share with others.
Saqib has started a case study of Malaysian hosts seen from Malaysian Monitors. He needs to add 3 more graphs.
UUM
Regarding the monitoring host in UUM, Adib has assigned one student to prepare the configuration/installation plan including how to secure our host from attack. He has a public IP address. He needs to the DNS registration by Sunday or Monday. He is in the last stage of working with the Computer Center. Adib requested Johari to share the UNIMAS setting so it is easier for the student to follow.
NUST
Kashif has returned. He had a power outage for much of the meeting.
The process of trouble shooting/rebuilding Maggie1 will be pursued by Kashif (now Joun has left).
The BeaconLists at NUST and SLAC are out of sync. 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. The contact was on leave 4/9/2014
The installation of PingER at Sahiwal is complete. It just needs the Beacon List. It was awaiting Kashif's return.
BUITMS has been fixed. It is working now with the standard BeaconList and HostList.
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.
Raja
Added 92 new perfSONAR landmarks to TULIP DB, 48 of which are geographically unique. This gives us a total of 1010 landmarks, 316 of which are currently enabled for geolocation.
Written a script to find landmarks with incorrect coordinates. So far have identified 2 in North America, still looking for others.
A link to Vtrace from the perfSONAR home page has been added. perfSONAR has updated to a new release. With this there are more perfSONAR landmarks available.
Raja, Umar and Les are working on a paper on TULIP and its application to Visual Tracerouting to be submitted later this year
PingER at SLAC
Les requested an update from Yahoo about TULIP's gelocation. They answered "We are very much interested in getting IP triangulation at internet scale, we will have internal sync-up on how we can leverage this initiative if there is rate limit and get back. Regarding opening up yahoo sites for deploying ping server requires some more time to discuss this with relevant stake holders with in yahoo."
Les sent email to Google as follows: "I would like to bring to your attention that we have developed a geolocation tool using delay based (using RTTs from known ping server landmarks) distance estimates to triangulate the location of an IP host target. The tools is accessible at: http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/reflex.cgi. We have identified that the accuracy of the geolocation is directly related to the landmark density (e.g. # of landmarks/ million sq km). The higher the density the smaller the error. We currently have over 1000 registered landmarks, of which at any given time ~300 are working. The tool not onlyfinds the location of the target, it also gives an estimated error. To the best of our knowledge it is the only freely available delay based measurement geolocation tool publicly available today. A drawback (compared to database methods such as those based on GeoMind) is the time taken to make the measurements. We have worked in this from manydirections including parallelization of the ping requests, caching, tiering to get the rough location (i.e. region of the world) then zooming in using all landmarks in the region. We are putting together a publication on this."
The PingER monitoring hosts at Taiwan, FNAL, UERJ(.br), sprace(.br), and South Africa(.za) have been restored to a working state.
Les contacted the Hong Kong, Rutherford Lab (.uk), Daresbury Lab (.uk), CEFET (.br, UNESP(.br) and ACMESecurity (.br) PingER monitors to try and get them fixed. The Hong Kong contact has retired. The others have not responded.
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 23rd 2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday April 24th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday April 24th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday April 24th, 2014 02:00am Rio Standard Time.