20161026 SLAC SEECS and UNIMAS Meeting

Time & date 

Wednesday Oct 26th  9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Oct 27th 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Oct 27th  2016 12:00noon Malaysian time, 

Coordinates of team members:

See: http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php

Attendees

Invitees:

Hassaan Khaliq, Muhammad Anas Abrar (SEECS); Saqib+, Aqsa (UAF); Johari+, Adnan Khan (UNIMAS);  Badrul,  Ridzuan, Ibrahim (UM); (UTM); Adib, Fatima (UUM); Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Les+, Bebo+,

+ Confirmed attendance

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

? Individual emails sent

Actual attendees:

Johari, Saqib, Bebo and Les

Administration

• Membership of pinger-my in https://groups.google.com

• Hassaan has joined Frederick University, Cyprus as a post doctoral fellow for six months. From now onwards, Dr. Wajahat (Faculty member) and Mr. Ajmal Farooq (Network Administrator, SEECS) shall be coordinating with us. I also have a Skype meeting scheduled with them tomorrow. They shall hopefully be contacting you soon. Regarding the progress of the nodes, they are also trying to address the pending issues. 

  Dr Walahat sent email "

  Myself, Mr. Ajmal and an intern, is the new SEECS team assigned to look after the pingER Pakistan. Here is my brief introduction (https://es.linkedin.com/in/wajahat-hussain-13a2907b). Right now we are in the transition phase. Hopefully by the end of this week we will be in the position to update you.

  If possible we'll also want to know the exciting questions on your mind. Master students are eager to work on this project."
  Mian Abras Abar unable to attend but  will make a report and email that to me.
• After the meeting Les invited Dr. Wajahat and Mr. Ajmal Farooq to the pinger-my email list.  Les also sent their email addresses to Johari so he can add them to http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php

PingER for Android (see ePingER on Android two methods).

Amity - Java approach (A. Sai Sabitha and Shivnarayan Rajappa)

1. They are using the native java tools, they are not running the pinger2.pl <http://pinger2.pl>  script on android since the native java tools have the following advantages
   1. easier for user, 
   2. no need for prior installation of any software, e.g. load perl interpreter which may require missing skills, especially for a non technical user
   3. doesn't need a rooted phone
   4. only the apk needs to be installed to run

2.  They have fixed the final sequence number change by using regex, and  pushed these changes to github repository.

3. They have installed apache tomcat in the server and plan to use a java file on the server which would connect to the phones that send the request. This java file will then take the input stream received from the phone and write the output stream to a file that would be stored on the server. We are facing some problems regarding a blocked port that is not allowing the phone to connect to the server we are currently working on resolving the issue.

4.  SLAC can then regularly pull these files which would be stored based on the month they are received. 

5. The Android students have started writing a paper on " implementation  of pinger  on android " .

6. Next steps:

   1. Extend the target list by getting the Beacon list from SLAC. It is at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/pinger.xml on a regular basis and updating the <BeaconList> section at their site. This was part of pinger2.pl. 

   2. Also they will need a utility to clean out old recorded data (say older than 3 months), since it will be gathered from SLAC (via the proxy) and eventually they may run out memory on the Android.

UAF Saqib and Sara Masood

1. Device ready, will assign live IP to machine next week, then will contact Les to try and gather data.

Discussion

To a large extent it depend on how we plan to use this.

• If the phones are just MAs in a fixed location then simply porting pinger2.pl is easier and probably sufficient.  
• If this is intended to grow into a mobile application for general use then it needs to be the Java implementation.

A next step is to get the data from the phone MA to the archive at SLAC. The current method ping_data.pl requires a public IP address for the phone which may not exist if its is mobile. Getting the MA to put the data to the archive may raise some security issue for the archiver.

UUM

From Adib:

• Adib has written a very nice paper on a case study of ASEAN countries Internet connectivity seen from SLAC and relating that to various socio-economic indices.

• We are working with SLAC the DoE etc. to get an invite to Adib to visit SLAC.

• Adib asked a student (Jaafrau)  to explore  “Creative visualization of PingER data, including rich interaction;”.  He has come up with a good design, yet the development part needs a lot of work. Adib will ask him to upload his interface and share the link. No update 8/24/2016 is there an update?

• Adib has another student starting in September. Adib will look at directing him to PingER.  Any update?

• Adib had a meeting with Mr. Chaisit Choosong <chaisitc@gmail.com>, from Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya last week. Adib  gave him a brief about PingER project, aim, objectives, and its installation requirements.  He is interested to setup a PingER monitoring node at his site. Adib sent another email to introduce Chaisit to Dr. Les and hopefully, Les has followed up with an email on 8/21/2016 with an invitation and information on how to set up the monitor. Adib  will follow  up.  We at SLAC have not heard anything 10/26/2016

UNIMAS

UAF (Saqib)

The MA at UAF is ready to go, it just needs a port. 

Saqib has been talking to Muhammad Asif of the Nationall University of Textiles, Discussed last week to put up MA and get a student. Arshad was the Chancellor.

Hauwei working with Arshad to sign an MoU to place a researcvh establishment in Pakistan 

There are 4 students:  Aqsa Hameed, Saba Muzamil, Tahseen and Sara Masood. T

• Aqsa has completed her research work on "visualization on pingER data" and now working on to publish a conference paper. Here are few details of the research work.

  • The query results can be exported as CSV file. I use the CSV file of Query results from Impala to draw Line and Bar charts by using Google API.

  • She has created a Data warehouse on pingER data. First we transform the pingER text files into CSV files. Then i upload these CSV files on HDFS and populate Impala Tables and queries.

  • Line and Bar charts are created on a webpage running or executed by localhost server. it can be updated as the query results varies.
  • Submitted to International conference, waiting to hear

• Aqsa and Saba are working together. Their goal is focusing on visualization of PingER historical data using warehouse.  The idea is to develop a warehouse in UAF university and make it publicly available. 

• Aqsa has put together an  abstract of a conference paper and submitted to "The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Science, Engineering and Applications (BDSEA 2016)" (http://computing.derby.ac.uk/bdcat2016/).  "Applying Big Data Warehousing and Visualization Techniques on pingER Data",  Aqsa Hameed, Dr. Saqib Ali, Dr. Les Cottrell and Bebo White, submitted to BDSEA 2016. Authors can access it via:   https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bdsea2016. Aqsa updated the paper and submitted, the last date for submit is 31st August, 2015. The conference is 6-9 Shanghai.

• Sara Masood - See PingER on Android above

• Saqib will proceed to install Pinger in UAF Pakistan 6/22/2016.There used to be an MA at UAF Les sent the information to Saqib. He has the userid and password, The IP address will change

• Doing case study on SAsia using PingER.

MYREN

• pingersonar-utm.myren.net.my is having problems (not pingable), email sent to Fitzi 8/20/2016, 10/16/2016

PingER at SLAC

PingER has run out of storage space. Les is moving the data to clean up some space. 

 Working on the following hosts to be able to gather data

NUST

• Currently it does not respond to ping pingerqta.pern.edu.pk

  • 271cottrell@pinger:~$ping pingerqta.pern.edu.pk
    ping: unknown host pingerqta.pern.edu.pk

  • [cottrell@pinger ~]$ nslookup pingerqta.pern.edu.pk

    272cottrell@pinger:~$nslookup pingerqta.pern.edu.pk
    Server: 134.79.111.111
    Address: 134.79.111.111#53

    ** server can't find pingerqta.pern.edu.pk: NXDOMAIN

• 274cottrell@pinger:~$ping 121.52.157.157
  PING 121.52.157.157 (121.52.157.157) 56(84) bytes of data.
  ^C
  --- 121.52.157.157 ping statistics ---
  6 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 5625ms

• http://121.52.157.148, responds with the default Apache web page
• http://121.52.157.148//cgi-bin/ping_data.pl? responds (albeit very slowly) with Get Ping Data from sharedw228.b2bhosting.net  Also there is data. 
  • This is a funny hostname. It comes from the system response to the perl commands:

    • use Net::Domain qw(hostname hostfqdn hostdomain);
      my $hostname = hostfqdn();

• The following needs to reflect the new IP address at 121.52.157.148. It is very easy to change the IP address once the Measurement Agent is up and running and responding, in fact the PingER meta data at SLAC was changed in February 2015. However the DNS still points to:

  • Output from: /bin/cat /etc/hosts # Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 121.52.157.157 pingerqta.pern.edu.pk 

Also asked for an update on the following 7/30/2016:

As of 8/19/2016 the following hosts are down and not responsive for >= 1 month. Anas Abrar reports the nodes were contacted many times for identifying their issues. i.e turn on their pinGER Computers but never responded well. Some have already been Disabled, (strikethroughs as proposed at the 6/22/2016 meeting and hearing nothing from Pakistan following the meeting), I will disable the others if I hear nothing.

• aup.seecs.edu.pk^ #Anas Abrar reports: AUP said that they will look intothe issue in a while everytime I ask them or give them the reminder. Does not ping. No data sinve Nov 2015, Disabled 8/19/2016. Renabled at at request of Abrar 8/21/2016
• cae.seecs.edu.pk^ #Does not ping, No data since Jan 2016, Disabled 8/19/2016, Re-enabled at request of Abrar 8/21/2016.
• maggie1.seecs.edu.pk^ # Ping responds with Time to live exceeded, No data since March 2016, , Disabled 8/19/2016, re-enabled at request of Abrar 8/21/2016
• maggie2.seecs.edu.pk^ #Does not ping. No data since March 2016, Disabled 8/19/2016, re-enabled at request of Abrar 8/21/2016.
• namal.seecs.edu.pk^ #Does not ping, no data since June 2016
• npm.neduet.edu.pk* # Not pingable I no longer gather data from it so state unknown 7/30/2016, no data since Aug 2015, Disabled 6/19/2016.
• pinger.comsats.edu.pl^ #Does not ping, no data since June 2016.
• pinger.iba-suk.edu.pk(30)^ # Pings, ping_data.pl gives page not found from Sukkar Instituute of Business Administration, disabled 8/8/2016 no data for 12 months. Re-enabled by Cottrell at request of Abrar 8/21/2016.
• pinger.isra.edu.pk^ # Not pingable, No longer gather data from it so state is unknown 7/30/2016, Disabled 8/19/2016, re-enabled at request of Abrar 8/21/2016.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Wednesday Dec, 7th 8pm Pacific time,  Thursday Dec 8th, 2016  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Dec 8th 2016 12:00noon Malaysian time