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Follow up on Discussions with VC
Unimas will send a formal invite to Les to visit Unimas for the order of a week or more to coincide with the Unimas 20 year anniversary celebrations on December 12th, 2012. Unimas will send Les a formal letter of invitation to aid with visa etc.
Unimas plan to have a workshop on Pinger when Les comes in December. Unimas will invite participants from universities in West Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, (Brunei and Kalimantan could be added). The idea is to establish regional agreement for types of studies that can be undertaken, the sharing of data and exploration of future projects.
In the meantime Les has put together more detail on what the Unimas student or staff would be engaged in at SLAC etc. We went through this at the meeting and agree it is a useful start.
Share an office with Les. This will provide quick response to questions and suggestions. Les will provide supervision and mentorship. there should also be a superviasor in UNIMAS. Have access to SLAC facilities (computing account, office space, facilities etc.)
The exact tasks to be performed will depend to some extent on the students interests. The following are potential areas for tasks.
Work on PingER Wide Area Network monitoring.
• Using and extending the PingER project tools. This would include the measurement agents, the gathering and archiving, the analysis, the graphical presentation tools, the documentation etc.
• Provide improved PingER management tools to automatically discover problems, reporting relevant detailed information.
• Mining the data for research; analyzing to provide case studies of Internet events (such as cable cuts, new installations, political turmoil, earthquakes, tsunamis, trends, correlations with other non Internet indices etc.); providing status reports; devising new ways to analyze the data; identify, filter and report on anomalies in near real time; correlate the anomalies across multiple links and multiple metrics.Work on graphical front ends for the perfSONAR network monitoring. This will be mainly with Dr Yee Ting Li.
Work on geo locating target hosts by means of ping Round Trip Times from known landmarks to provide information for trilateration.
Coordinate fortnightly phone meetings with UNIMAS.
Coordinate weekly phone meetings with NUST Pakistan.
Les will send a typical SLAC invitation letter to Nara. Done.
Typically visits are expected to be for about a year. UNIMAS are on a 2 semester system. There is a a break of 3 weeks. the semesters start September and February.
Unimas are going to propose a project to install ePingER hosts in remote Sarawak communities such as Bario in the Kelabit highlands. Initially these would simply be PingER targets responding to pings. Later depending on bandwidth availabilty etc. They could also be turned into PingER monitoring hosts and a web site.
There is an Internet2 / ESnet Joint Techs meeting from the 13th-17th January 2013 in Hawai, I will attendi. The focal areas are: Network Research and Emerging Technologies; Network Architecture and Operations; R&E Network Applications. there are also usually session on non US networks, for example at the last meeting at Stanford there was a talk on Challenges of Building an Affordable and Scalable Wireless Network at Universities in West Africa & KENET: Where we are , see http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012summer/20120718-Wanja-Njue.pdf and http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012summer/20120718-Togo-challenges%20building%20wifi%20networks.pdf. Les has also sent information on a workshop in Salt Lake City in November. Les does not currently know of a particular relevant other conference/meeting especially one on the West Coast of the US or even better in the Bay Area.The government of Sarawak is embarking on a huge project on renewable energy. This is a big issue in Sarawak partially due to the isolation of many places. They have lots pf water so hydro-electric power is very interesting. They are interested what SLAC or Stanford are doing in this area. This is not an area Les is directly associated with, Being funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE) SLAC is interested in Energy. There is basic research focused on how catalysts work, how does sunlight work in plants to sequester carbon and produce energy, looking at the challenge to transform our future energy supplies from fossil fuels to renewable energy while still enabling economic growth see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports19/slac-r-993.pdf. There is also work on the Stanford campus and DoE sites see for example http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/energyss/2010//Speakers.asp. Also we strive to expand the use of renewable energy within our facility and our activities by implementing renewable energy projects and by purchasing electricity from renewable energy sources.
The VC also expressed interest in setting up a meeting with the SLAC Director Persis Drell to share ideas. Les has been working with SLAC's layers of management to set up a phone call between Vice Chancellor of UNIMAS and SLAC Director. SLAC director requested more information on the reasons for the meeting, and if we look forward, if this collaboration is going to continue, to ensure there is an Associate Director at SLAC sponsoring this collaboration. I was away for a couple of weeks. I met after my return with the CIO and he is in favor of pushing forward. He requested I work directly with the COO to set up the meeting. The meeting will be early next week. If the VC has particular agenda for the phone meeting that would be useful to prepare for. If it is just a meet and greet it would be good to know that roo.
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Imran has successfully assigned the DNS name pinger.unimas.my to the UNIMAS PingER monitor (49.50.236.98). Les has tested the ping and traceroute servers and the ping_data server and all work correctly. *Les sent email to Mohamad 8/22/2012 with a reminder 9/5/2012 to coordinate the changes to the PingER meta data base (NODEDETAILS) and the pinger.xml file at UNIMAS.
Can we "cut over" the monitoring to use the DNS name of the UNIMAS host. This means you (Mohammed) will need to change pinger.xml From <SrcName>49.50.236.98</SrcName> To <SrcName>pinger.unimas.my</SrcName>
And I will need to modify the PingER meta database (NODEDETAILS) at SLAC.
Once you have made your change, please let me (Les) know and I will change my end.
Mohammed is still in KL arranging his visa application. He'll complete the above once he is back in Kuching.
Extending UNIMAS PingER hosts monitoring
Has there been any progress on extending pinger.xml at UNIMAS to add a dozen or more hosts in Malaysia. Les sent email to Johari 8/22/2012 and again 9/7/2012 requesting an update. Information on how to add hosts can be found at:
See the documentation on pinger2.pl. Basically you have to edit the pinger.xml file (normally to be found in /usr/local/share/pinger/pinger.xml) to add the extra hosts in the field:
<HostList> This field holds any number of <Host>-entries which will get called by PingER2. In contrast to <BeaconList> these entries are not overridden by the refresh as defined in <BeaconListConfig>. That means that all custom hosts that are to be monitored in addition to the BeaconList should go into this list.
Example:
<HostList>
<Host>
<Name>www.cc.gatech.edu</Name>
</Host>
<Host>
<Name>www.foo.bar</Name>
<IP>192.168.1.1</IP>
</Host>
</HostList>
These entries will be preserved in this file until you re-edit them
Looking at the pinger.xml there has been no progress on this.
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Johari will try, before the next meeting, to get the list of sites that are above mention into the pinger.xml file and identify at least a dozen or more potential sites in Malaysia.
For how to add hosts to pinger.xml see: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/faq.html#extra.
The monitoring will provide an historical record of performance (round trip times, jitter, loss), reachability etc. Based on this a case study could be put together to identify problems in particular the reliability (e.g. MTBF, uptime, MTTF), how congested the connection is, identify problems and possibly identify the causes.
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- Computing requirements, accounts at SLAC
- Interim email lists and SMS txt messages
- Documentation respository (probably use the SLAC wiki)
- Follow on meetings would include identified students, progress reports etc.
Miscellaneous
The government of Sarawak is embarking on a huge project on renewable energy. This is a big issue in Sarawak partially due to the isolation of many places. They have lots pf water so hydro-electric power is very interesting. They are interested what SLAC or Stanford are doing in this area. This is not an area Les is directly associated with, Being funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE) SLAC is interested in Energy. There is basic research focused on how catalysts work, how does sunlight work in plants to sequester carbon and produce energy, looking at the challenge to transform our future energy supplies from fossil fuels to renewable energy while still enabling economic growth see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports19/slac-r-993.pdf. There is also work on the Stanford campus and DoE sites see for example http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/energyss/2010//Speakers.asp. Also we strive to expand the use of renewable energy within our facility and our activities by implementing renewable energy projects and by purchasing electricity from renewable energy sources.
Useful links
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