Page History

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

• We are working with Dr Zaidi the new head of SEECS to investigate resources need to continue support of PingER in Pakistan. We communicated first week in August. No word since. Sent a reminder 8/1/2015. We had a rump meeting of Anjum, Hassaan and Les to discuss the way forward.

• NETAPPS2015: Adib reports "We have received some good number of submissions and the reviewing process have started already. we will have a committee meeting tomorrow at the same time of PINGER group meeting. I will update you afterward."
  

  • Four papers were submitted related to PingER August 25th

  • Anjum submitted a paper to NETAPPS2015 "Adaptive Geolocation of Internet Hosts"

  • Les, Thiago, Johari, Bebo and Topher White submitted a paper on "Worldwide Internet Performance Measurements Using Lightweight Measurement Platforms"

  • Saqib submitted a paper "PingER Malaysia-Internet Performance Measuring Project: A Case Study". This paper needs reformatting, Saqib is working on it. It also needs reviewing. Les will look at.

  • Thiago and the Brazilian team submitted a paper on "Applying Data Warehousing and Big Data Techniques to Analyze Internet Performance'. Adib has kindly come up with a way in which the authors are unlikely to be able to attend, so somebody else will present. This has been accepted

Geolocation Anjum, 

• Anjum believes the TULIP Geolocation application  can be improved significantly. At least there are few ideas that we can try. For this, either a group of undergraduate students or an active masters student is required. The resultant work can easily be the thesis of masters level. Who is interested? 

  • Saqib is going to see if he has a student interested. He will contact Anjum to learn more. Update Saqib, Anjum not heard

  • Johari will contact Anjum to learn more of the requirements. Update Johari/Adnan

  • See http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/tulip/. Basically TULIP uses pings to a target from landmarks at known locations and converts the minimum RTTs to estimate the distances. Then uses the distances with mulitlateration to estimate the location of the target

  • To improve TULIP one needs the right selection of landmarks, i.e. good (working landmarks) at the right locations (not too far from the target), straddling the target, and with a a reasonable estimate of the indirectness (directivity or alpha) of the path from the landmark to the target (so we can reasonably accurately estimate the distance). One also needs a reasonable density of landmarks (e.g. number of targets/100,000sq km)

  • The landmarks come from PingER and perfSONAR sites.  We have a reasonable density in the US, Pakistan and Europe. Currently Anjum is getting better than 20km accuracy for Pakistani targets

  • As the number of landmarks goes up so does the accuracy, but so does the time to make the measurements (pings). 

  • One needs to find the optimal density

  • Anjum proposes to speed up the measurements using a cluster for parallelization and also proposes to improve the adaptation of alpha based region. He regards the adaptive geolocation and parallelization as  MS projects

  • He is also interested in geolocation in small proximity (e.g.indoors), e.g. using cell tower signals. This is a new area of research. It is possible that the port of PingER to an Android could  be rleated to this. This is a PhD project

Android - Bebo

• Bebo said Topher would be interested in getting a student to port PingER to an Android. Les has put the PingER MA server on Github.  Les put out a version on Github at https://github.com/iepm/. He put them out there in 2013 as part of coordinating with Google( which did not get very far). It has been dormant since it was put out there. He is not a github expert or user so is  unclear how complete it is or who can access it. 

   

Unrest in Malaysia - Anjum, Johari, Les

• Anjum wondered if PingER could detect anomalies related to the recent unrest (protests against the government and DOS attacks against universities (such as UM or UNIMAS) in Malaysia. there were several attacks from the Anonymous group between August 28-31st. Following the meeting Les put out a web page at: Malaysian unrest Aug-Sep 2015

Intern Anjum

• We discussed the potential for an undergraduate from UM spending 6 months at SLAC as an intern. SLAC would be very interested, however SLAC cannot sponsor a J1 visa for anyone who does not have the equivalent of a US bachelors degree. Anjum will pass this on and pursue from the UM end.

UFRJ

UUM

Unable to gather data from pinger.uum.edu.my since July 12th, 2015. Adib is still waiting computer center staff to check the firewall at their side. There is an idea to relocate Pinger.UUM to computer center to avoid this hassle. 

Fatima is currently occupied with putting together her report. Regarding her work, she has successfully implemented some MapReduce codes on the data and presently fixing some errors in the code.

UM

Ibrahim had downloaded PingER in Zip files format, however, when he stored them in the Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) and try to process them, the file got corrupted, so he had to extract the file, but one file zip has more than 10000 zip files with small size.  So he is trying to create a mapreduce job which can accept zip format, that will save lot of his time. Currently mapreduce can only read from files like .txt, and any doc file format or database. He will have meeting with Dr. Anjum on 11 of june asking for advice and seeking of how we can work on this together. No  update 9/2/2015. Anjum will contact Ibrahim.

Renan reports: "I had a similar experience. HDFS works better with bigger files rather than many small files. What I did was to create a Map-Reduce job to reduce all those thousands of small files into only 17 big files, each of them containing all data for a given year [1998-2014].I didn't use Hadoop MapReduce for this, though. I used a different dataflow distributed engine that also implements map and reduce operators. I am working on providing Thiago these 17 big files. Once he gets the data, he can share them with you and explain how the data on each file are stored".

UNIMAS

UTM

Johari will contact Hanan to request someone to support PingER at UTM, now Saqib has left. (6/3/2015/. Hanan not replying to Johari, Johari will try another route to get a replacement for Saqib at UTM 8/12/2015). 9/2/2015 still unable to contact Hanan, Johari will try and contact the Dean.

Saqib points out a number of Malaysian routes are IPv6 which could have problems for traceroute. Saqib is checking

MYREN

No update 8/12/2015, no Update 9/2/2015

perfsonar-unimas.myren.net.my is down since July 1st. Johari (9/2/2015) believes it may be due to a recent upgrade of the network SAN.

NUST

Working with Dr Zaidi to get support. Await update from Dr Zaidi (8/12/2015, sent reminder 9/1/2015). Following this meeting, Anjum, Hassaan and Les met to discuss the way forward.

PingER at SLAC

• Thiago completed setting up the  PingER data SQL Impala warehouse running on a Nebula/Cloudera cluster using the Hadoop File System (HDFS)the PingER warehouse database at SLAC. Unfortunately it is not currently accessible from outside SLAC. There have been several attempts, but no success yet, we need to engage the subject matter experts. Thiago is now a SLAC associate so he still has an account at SLAC. There is a cyber security alert on the version of java installed with Cloudera. Thiago is in New York and does not currently have WiFi.

• The Raspberry Pi at SLAC is still running smoothly since June 11th.

Working on the following hosts to be able to gather data 

Bebo arranged a meeting with the Colombia RENATA NREN folks and the minister of IT to discuss the use of PingER in Colombia. There is a web page at: Colombia. Les has sent an email asking them to install pinger2.pl at at least one site in Columbia. Sent a reminder email 2/27/2015. Bebo will send a gentle reminder to the RENATA people of Columbia to see whether they continue to be interested and need a meeting. They still seem interested.  9/2/2015, still no consistent answers from Colombia, we will give up.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Wednesday Oct 7th 2015 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Oct 8th 2015  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Oct 8th 2015 noon Malaysian time, Thursday Oct 8th  2015 02:00am Rio Standard Time.  

Old Items

NUST/SEECS Pakistani PingER nodes status

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