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 now updated the underlying ping command to ping -n -c 10 -w 30 -i 1 -s 100 www.google.com <http://www.google.com>  this now allows them to collect 10 pings with 30 pings being the maximum limit. The attached text file (data.rtf) shows a sample situation wherein 11 packets are sent and 10 are received where packet 3 was lost. This was not possible in the previous implementation.

    1. There is a bug in the sequence number reported, they are looking at.

  3. They have also tested all the other edge cases and use regex to validate the ping data received before writing it to the text file. If they get an unknown host it fails the regex check therefore is not written into the text file. 

  4. Next steps:

    1. Extend 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. They are using the original pinger2.pl script.
    1. This guarantees a better, more complete (logs, checks, updating the Beacon list etc.) match to the existing MAs. 
  2. There is a tutorial on installing the android version. 
  3. Screen shot of pinger2.pl executing
  4. Example of saved 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.

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