Time & date
Wednesday June 4th, 2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday June 5th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday June 5th, 2014 12:00 noon Malaysian time, Thursday June 5th, 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:
Anjum
Actual attendees:
Kashif, Raja, Johari, Saqib, Les, Bebo
Administration
Adib is waiting to hear from colleague (Dr. Nordin: chair of ISTT2014), there was no update as of this meeting. The conference is 2 days so the workshop may be squeezed to one day. The conference will be held in Langkawi between 24-26 Nov.
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.
- Anjum will try and contact Adib. Anjum is also putting together a conference on cloud computing in November. We do not have a particular date. Anjum believes it is possible to co-locate the PingER workshop with this conference. The emphasis would be on PingER as a source of Big Data. This could also involve Bebo, Ridzuan and Ibrahim.
Adib is trying a number of options and there is some progress.
Anjum talked to his supervisor. He is showing revived interest in PingeR. He was busy the day Anjum talked to him. Anjum will have another meeting with him on Friday to further discuss the possibility of combining the conference with workshop.
Les will be in Burkina Faso Nov 13-21. He flies back to London on Nov 22nd. He can get to Malaysia mid morning November 24th. Thus the workshop should be at the end of the ISTT2014 meeting if Les is to attend.
- Bebo will be Western Australia, Okinawa and possibly Singapore in November. Bebo will send his expected dates/itinerary.
- Anjum suggested putting together a paper on metrics provided by PingER for Sigmetrix. The due date is in November.
Renan
Renan and his supervisor were at Stanford for the Academy of Science 2014 Bigdata / SocialCom / Cybersecurity conference at Stanford May 27-31. The poster session on Linked Open Data Publication Strategies: Application in Networking Performance Measurement Data" was well attended. See https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Papers+and+Presentations for access to the paper and poster. After meeting with Renan's supervisor (Maria, Luiza Campos) she will be looking for a couple of students at UFRJ to assist Renan.
UM
Badrul is still awaiting hearing from his student (Abdulrahim Haroun Ali) on the paper on anomalies in PingER measurements and will update later once the paper ready. No word from Badrul 6/4/2014.
Ridzuan has put together a rough proposal to use Hadoop to store and make available PingER data. He is evaluating several vendors version of Hadoop 2.0 installations to decide which is the right one to adopt. Last time he successfully installed and tried Hadoop 1.0 but then it has many drawbacks such as no real-time streaming processing. Johari sent information on the Myren Cloud. The web site is as follows: https://cloud.myren.net.my/. It gives information about the service and how to apply, plus user guide is available from the website. As for Ridzuan, he should be eligible to register for the service, but he needs to check with UM (University Malaya) procedures for applying for the service. No word from Ridzuan 6/4/2014.
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+pingER+big+data+with+a+modified+pingtable+for+event-correlation+and+clustering.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. No word from Ibrahim 6/4/2014.
UNIMAS
Dr. Adnan Shahid Khan who recently joined UNIMAS, will be joining our PingER group and will help with the current PingER initiative in UNIMAS. Once he is up to speed on PingER he will join the group.
The Raspberry Pi is at the data centre and has a public IP address. It was working last week, until the UPS failed over the weekend. It did mnot reboot itself. Johari will look at the problem.
The tool to enable synchronizing Malaysian monitors is completed. It has been tested by Saqib. 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, 4/23/2014, 6/4/2014. 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. No progress 6/4/2014.
UTM
No updates regarding traceroute problem at UTM. However, Saqib thinks the problem is still in CICT firewall or router as tcp traceroute command works fine from UTM.
Les has reviewed the Malaysian Case Study and sent suggestions. Saqib will incorporate. Saqib met with MYREN who have made many topology changes. Saqib will also incoportate these into the Malaysian case study.
Saqib is in discussions with his PhD superviser to get the requirements for a PingER proposal and to see where to submit it.
UUM
Regarding the monitoring host in UUM, Adib has assigned one student to prepare the configuration/installation plan including how to secure their host from attack. He has a public IP address. He needs to the DNS registration by Sunday 25th May 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. No update 6/5/2014.
NUST
All references for the Bahawalpur site goes to Director IT, but he is still silent and we are waiting for his reply.
Kashif reports the following are now fixed:
- Air University HEC-PoP (pingerisl-air.pern.edu.pk)
- Quaid-e-Azam University HEC-PoP (pingerisl-qau.pern.edu.pk)
- cae.seecs.edu.pk
- nukhimain.seecs.edu.pk
- pingerjms.pern.edu.pk
Kashif is working on the rest of nodes. He plans to have 3 or 4 more up and running this coming week.. Among those, may be the following that have not responded to gathering data in the last month are:
- airuniversity.seecs.edu.pk
- duhs.seecs.edu.pk
- pinger.kohat.edu.pk
- pingerkhi-uok.pern.edu.pk
- sau.seecs.edu.pk
- uaf.seecs.edu.pk
Then we will decide whether to disable the remaining non-working monitors.
Raja
Raja has improved improving the GUI for TULIP. In particular visualizing the intersection region (showing both the minimum and maximal circles), showing landmarks, adding Google analytics. Raja has added undns (a tool for guessing the location from the router name) to TULIP and also to VTrace. It is not very successful, its heuristics are outdated (last update 2005)
PingER at SLAC
Les requested an update from Yahoo about TULIP's geolocation. 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." No word, sent a reminder 5/19/2014. No response 6/4/2014.
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 and the fall off is exponential. We currently have over 1000 registered landmarks, of which at any given time ~300 are working. The tool not only finds 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 service 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 on this from many directions 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."
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 June 25th 2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday June 26th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday June 26th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday June26th, 2014 01:00am Rio Standard Time.