20180118 PingER Team Meeting

Time & date 

Thursday, January 18th  8 pm Pacific time;  Friday, January 19th, 2018  9:00 am Pakistan time; Friday, January 19th, 2018 12:00 noon Malaysian and Guangzhou time; and 11 am Thailand time.

Format

New items and updates are in bold face.

Coordinates of team members:

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

Johara added Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul <charnsak.s@ubru.ac.th>, Skype ID charnsaksrisawatsakul. Faculty of Computer Science Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University, Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand,  web site http://www.charnsak.com to the file.

Attendees

Invitees:

Wajahat Hussain+, ajmal.farooq@seecs.edu.pk, Muhammad Anas Abrar (SEECS); Saqib+, Aqsa (UAF); Johari+, Adnan Khan (UNIMAS);  Badrul,  Ridzuan, Ibrahim (UM); (UTM); Adib?, Fatima (UUM); Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul+, Les+, Bebo+

+ Confirmed attendance

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

? Individual emails sent

Actual Attendees

Adib, Bebo, Charnsak, Johari, saqib, Wajahat, Les

Others

Administration

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

Amity

• Manuscript titled - Clustering Analysis of PingER Network Data for Vardha Cyclone has been PEER REVIEWED and ACCEPTED for publication in the Confluence-2018:8th International Conference: on the theme “Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering”  prevented on 11th - 12th January 2018 at Amity University Uttar Pradesh, Noida, India. 

• Their PingER MA system has crashed and they are reinstalling the project.

  • They are having problems with the traceroute server and ping_data.pl (that gathers the data). Les is working with them. I believe traceroute.pl (they have an unusual linux traceroute command that does not support all the options used by PingER) and ping_data.pl are fixed. It looks like pinger2.pl is not running.

Bebo

Looking into moving PingER to a "blockchain" database good for decentralize distribution of data. Monitoring sites would then be able to write to a distributed ledger. This would change the architecture to a more peer to peer architecture. It helps with continuity of PingER since reduces dependence on a single site (SLAC). See Block Chain in Future PingER Projects. Bebo sent several references to Saqib who has looked at them. We could start with real time data without including the whole archive, i.e. in parallel to the continued centrally manged archive. It would be a private Blockchain.  Joahari is also interested and will follow up with Bebo and Saqib.

Thailand

A possible project would be to compare the RTTs from ping/ICMP with those from TCP SYN ACK delays as seen from Thailand for both ipv4 and ipv6. See Validating ICMP ping measurements against TCP nping measurements. Les will send to Johari and Charnsak, the perl script (ping-vs-tcp.pl) he has written to make the measurements.

UUM (No input from Adib 12/7/2017)

• Adib has updated the paper on Internet Performance and its Reflection on Socioeconomic Development in the ASEAN Countries to IEEE Access and sent to Les and Bebo for review. Then we will need to find a suitable place to publish.

• The BIND paper ("BIND: An Indexing Strategy for Big Data Processing") is now online.  Adib will provide a URL or a copy of the paper so we can add it to papers related to PingER.

• There was  a problem pinging the MA pinger.uum.edu.my.  It is now working as promised.

• Adib, Bebo, Les met with Southampton Web observatory person. There seemed to be enthusiasm. Adib was going to send some materials to Southampton. The person at Southampton gave us some links. Adib is in the early stages of exploring what web observatory data to link with such as business context indicatorsm social media and  government sites.

NUST: Updates 12/8/2017

• aup.seecs.edu.pk  host is pingable, Wajahat still trying, not given up. Still down 4/15/2017, 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017, 9/16/2017 (does not ping), 1/8/2018 (pings). Contacted and they will fix the problem soon.10/24/2017. They are non responsive as of Jan 19, 2018. We will Disable
• cae.seecs.edu.pk working again as of 3/6/2017. Down since March 17, 2017. Down 7/3/2017, Down 8/11/2017 did not ping, 9/16/2017 pings but unable to gather any data. Reconfigured 9/19/2017. Intermittent access this month (10/24/2017). Worked for a day after configuring 11/28/2017. Worked Jan 1-5, no response Jan 6-7. Working since Jan 9th 2018.
• kinnaird.seecs.edu.pl pings but unable to gather data 8/11/2017, unable to ping, Contacted. 9/16/2017.  Unable to gather data. Contacted fix problem soon. 10/24/2017. Disabled 11/30/2017.
• namal.seecs.edu.pk (host is not pingable). Institution unreachable from start, we are trying to locate the person in charge, fingers crossed (Wajahat 1/10/206). Working 2/1/2018, still working 3/20/2017. Down since April 1st 2017. Down 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017. 9/16/2016 pings unable to gather data. Contact person missing. No data 10/24/2017. Unable to access this node. Disabled 11/30/2017
• nukimain.seecs.edu.pk down since March 24th, 2017. Down 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017,9/16/2017 unable to ping, still unable to ping or gather data. No contact information. 10/24/2017. Disabled 11/30/2017.
• pinger-ncp.ncp.edu.pk pings but can't gather data 8/11/2017 and 9/16/2017. Contacted. Pings but can't gather data 10/24/2017. They are in the process of restoring 1/17/2018.
• pinger.vu.edu.pk down since May 22nd, down 7/3/2017. Problem with missing XML/Simple.pm missing. It is working again as of  January 8th 2018.

They have made a list of new university sites, communications networks, Labs in different regions of Pakistan (especially the remote regions) and will make contact.

UNIMAS (Johari unable to attend 9/21/2017, 10/2617 12/07/2017 so no update)

• Johari ran into a problem with the Raspberry Pi image creation. Apparently the image has to be burnt with exactly the same size as the capacity of the microSSD, and the latter varies. There may not be a solution.
• He is looking at updating the PingER Malaysia web site.
• He has been unable to contact Hafiz to get MyREN monitor at UNIMAS working again. There was a dicussion between Johari and Adib. Adib confirm Hafiz is still at MYREN, MYREN are moving locations which may have impact on some servers and availability of Hafiz.  Adib will try and contact Hafiz.

UAF/GHZU (Saqib)

Pinger.gzhu.edu.cn MA is down due to a possible security issue. Is there any progress 1/18/2018, can we assist?

Saqib submitted a project in CERNET to monitor the performance of  IPv6 network using PingERv6. He received the news that the project is accepted with 100K RMB. Now he has 2 accepted projects regarding PingER and total amount he has is near about 40K USD. Further, in his lab, three U1 servers have already arrived through another  grant for research purpose. We can also use them for our PingER project.  

Therefore, the CERNET has given Saqib a IPv6 based CentOS 6.8 machine in cloud. Now he is  trying to deploy the PingER server on the machine. Lets see how it will work on IPv6 based network.  This is a 2 year project.

Saqib has made contact with John Pickard author of  "Quality of IPv6 Enablement of Universities: An International Study"  who has provided a list of about 125 Universities in about 60 countries hosting IPv6 sites. However many are proxies.  Les has suggested using perfSONAR (there are about 1000 and they all have lat longs in the sperfSONAR data base. Saqib is gathering the list, then we will see how many have IPv6 addresses.

Les is also looking at other sources of IPv6 hosts, for example the PingER targets (for which we have the lat/longs) has about 40 IPv6 hosts that respond to pings. Another source is perfSONAR. Les has created an XML file of the perfSONAR host which Saqib is going to look at to see which are IPv6 pingable.

Les will send Saqib a list of PingER Beacon sites that respond to IPv6 pings.

The paper title: " Missing Values Imputation in PingER Internet End-to-end Performance Measurements using k-nearest neighbors (k NN)" was not accepted in IMC 2017. He is updating the paper according to the reviewer’s comments. Hopefully, Saqib will submit it at some other venue. Not yet decided about the submission venue. Need some suggestions. Updated but not decided where to submit. Update 12/4/2017?

Currently, no data is available on PingER on Android due to unavailability of the live IP address. No update 4/19/2017, 7/6/2017. Email sent to Sara Masood. No update 9/24/2017. Any update 10/24/2017. No progress 1/18/2018.

PingER at SLAC

Working with Saqib to test pinger2.pl to make it work with IPv6 servers and targets.

• ipv6 connectivity is now available on pinger.slac.stanford.edu, thus I am able to test and fix  pinger2.pl MA code to ensure  works for IPv6.   
• Ran into a problem that IPv6 pings were being blocked at the SLAC border firewalls. This has been fixed.
• A host to test against is ipv6.google.com (2607:f8b0:4007:800::200e).
• gathering of the data from others sites is also fixed,
• aggregation, analysis, and presentation modified and believed fixed but not tested. 
• working on meta database to accept IPv6 addresses, close but not done.

Currently pinger2.pl works for either an IPv4 MA or an IPv6 MA, but not both at once. Thus Saqib has two MAs one for Ipv4 and one for IPv6. Looking at being able to make pinger2.pl work for both. This will enable migration, but will also require a new analysis and presentation, e.g. the ability to select IPv4 or IPv6 measurements or both.

Les has written scripts identify IPv6 pingable hosts in various lists including PingER hosts, perfSONAR hosts.

Looking at comparing ping RTTs vs those between sending a TCP SYN and receiving the ACK response for PingER hosts. See Validating ICMP ping measurements against TCP nping measurements.  The agreement looks good.

PingER data is currently kept on a Sun Solaris file server front ending a 1TByte disk array.  Solaris is no longer supported at SLAC and the disk array is 13 years old so we need to migrate the data to GPFS. Les is working on this and plans to make the move in the next 2 weeks.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Thursday, February 22nd  8pm Pacific time; Friday, February 23rd, 2018  9:00am Pakistan time; Friday, February 23rd 2018 12:00noon Malaysian and Guangzhou .time; and 11am Thailand time.

Old information

GZHU (moved here 1/15/2018)

PingER has valuable historical data for the last 20 years.Many analysis and case studies have been carried using this data. A lot of information is available on the website. Saqib's idea is to publish the brief summary all these analysis through a survey paper covering the history and utilization of PingER data starting from 1998 to 2017. Saqib started on it, Les is providing assistance. Need your feedback on the idea of Measuring the Digital Development of the Countries using PingER data.          Is there something you want me to review some, e.g. some draft document on Measuring the Digital Development of the Countries using PingER data , or are you asking if it is a good idea to review and create such a document. If the latter I think this is a fascinating subject. Part of the challenge is the chicken and egg problems: i.e. is it network performance influencing advancement of the country, or is it the reverse that advanced countries can afford good networks.  My belief is it goes both ways. Also one needs to extend the analysis beyond just Africa else it’s kind of a repeat of Pinging Africa , R. Les Cottrell, IEEE Spectrum February 2013. Also see A Simple Tool for Measuring Digital Development , by R. Les Cottrell, IEEE Spectrum February 2013. This is derived from SLAC-PUB-15333. 

UUM (moved here 10/24/2017)

"BIND: An Indexing Strategy for Big Data Processing" that uses PingER data. Submitted and accepted by the 2017 IEEE Region 10 Conference (TENCON) that takes place in November. In Penang Malaysia

GZHU

The paper title: "Detecting Anomalies from End-to-end Internet Performance Measurements (PingER) using Cluster Based Local Outlier Factor" is submitted in ISPA 2017 (http://trust.gzhu.edu.cn/conference/ISPA2017/). It has been accepted as of 9/17/2017.

The thesis of Aqsa Hameed title “Applying Data Mining and Visualization Techniques on Pinger Data” is published in ODBMs.org and is accessible through http://www.odbms.org/2017/07/applying-data-mining-and-visualization-techniques-on-pinger-data/

SEECS (moved here 9/19/2017.)

• Aqsa who was working with Saqib submitted  "Applying Big Data Warehousing and Visualization Techniques on pingER Data",  Aqsa Hameed, Dr. Saqib Ali, Dr. Les Cottrell and Bebo White, to BDSEA 2016.
• I see it is available from ACM online on the following link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3006299.3006337 for $15.
• This might be useful to Wajahat's student.

Amity (moved here 9/16/2017)

Preparing a paper on the impact of the cyclone Verdha that hit the Indian coast along with many countries like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Maldives on December 6th. They use K-Means clustering (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering) to identify anomalies in packets received (inverse of loss) and maximum RTT. Note that for December 7th the reduction in packets received.

Amity (moved here 5/18/2017)

From: Aayush Jain <aayush.2896@gmail.com>

Sent: 24 March 2017 12:31

To: A. Sai Sabitha; harysinha@gmail.com

Subject: PingER Android Team

Abstract for PingER on Android

Progress Made So Far

So far Shivnarayan Rajappa and Rohan Sampson’s team have succeeded in making a bare-bones Android Application that can ping beacons, parse data, and generate a text file in a format specified by SLAC ready for uploading. The proposed model involved the application pulling the beacon list from SLAC’s servers for pinging. However, the present application has a small percentage of the beacon list hard-coded into the application. As of now, the link between the application and proxy server has not been established.

Future Plans

The new team members are:

1. Rohit Raj

2. Shagun Seth

3. Savy Gupta

4. Aayush Jain

5. Tanuj Saraf

Owing to the advancements in Android technologies during the time of development of the project, our team believes that we can create a more capable and robust application for this project. This involves rewriting the entire application from scratch.

We also propose to create a proxy server that can act as an intermediary between the Android application and SLAC’s servers. The proxy server would thus allow handling multiple hosts for greater data collection.

Approach 

Our team plans to start off by completing the work on the Android app within 20 days. We will recreate the entire app, with an improved workflow for greater stability. The app will parse the beacon list from SLAC’s servers and save as an XML on the device. The data generated after every ping will be appended to a file after cleaning it up with RegEx matches. We first plan to test the app with only a few members of the ping list (which will later be expanded to auto-update in its entirety).

Once we accomplish our work with the app, we will move on to the task of establishing a proxy server. Our entire team will focus on the components of networking, host management, host authentication, file synchronization, and security.

By the end of the project, the server will be able to handle multiple hosts which would all forward it data, and it would in turn reorganise it again for SLAC’s servers to pull.

Amity (moved here 4/13/2017)

• The paper on Implementation of PingER on Android has been accepted by IEEE Section. The paper to be online will take  5 months. 
• Students are very interested in working with different projects. They have divided the students into three batches (each batch has min of 4 students).  The  projects currently  they are working are:
  • android, 
  • data analysis(vardha cyclone) 
  • and bigdata

Amity (moved here 3/12/2017)

The students successfully presented the paper on the PingER implementation on Android.at the confluence 2017 conference.. The paper is submitted to IEEE section. 

Tropical cyclone Vardah hit Chennai in India on the Dec 13th. It impacted the Internet, in particular one of Airtel's undersea cables. Les sent email to A. Sai Sabitha to see if  PingER from Amity could see any effect. 

• During the next 6 months their research will  study the impact Vardha cyclone that hit the Indian coast(South India/Chennai) and a few other neighboring countries in December 2016 as seen bu PingER. 

  • The idea is to study and  analyze the PingER data during the corresponding time frame  and deduce significant trends and patterns from the data using

  •  1. Clustering techniques
     2. Time series 
     3. Correlation and Regression concepts

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.

Discussion

To a large extent it depends 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.

Need your feedback on the idea of Measuring the Digital Development of the Countries using PingER data