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- Unable to attend
Actual attendees: Anjum, Kashif, Johari, Saqib, BeboBadrul, Les
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Workshop
It will be 25-26 June at the University of Malaya. There is a document. Abdullah has verbal approval, we are awaiting official approval
University of Malaya will issue the invitation letter after receiving an official approval. Hanan will have a meeting with Dr Abdullah and Johari at UM on the upcoming workshop after the middle of April.
It does not appear possible for UM to fund someone from NUST or Bebo. We have a contingency plan. However Les believes, and sent email to Abdullah stating, that it is critically important to have someone from NUST at the workshop. Abdullah asks if UNIMAS or UTM could fund the NUST person. Johari has forwarded a request to Nara. We hope to hear in a few days.
For attendees it is important to try and get 2 representatives from each of the 20 public Malaysian universities. One It would also be good to get a non MYREN University and someone from Malaysia Telecom. Bebo has sent contacts for MIMOS and Manipal. One participant would be from the computer division (more to do with installing and maintaining), the other from Faculty (more for the research side). Johari said there is space for 30. Anjum said we should invite more than 30 since there will be some who will not attend. We could go >30 people for the non technical sessions and restrict for the hands on. It would also be good to get a non MYREN University and someone from Malaysia Telecom. Bebo has sent contacts at MOMOS and Manipal.
Johari suggested a signing ceremony at the workshop for an MoU between UM, UTM and UNIMAS.
It is not easy to find pingable sites in some Malaysian states. Obvious targets are universities, for example UUM in Kedah and UNIMAP in Perlis, but those sites are not ping-able. One way is to approach these universities and explain to them about PingER project and request for the ping packet to be enable. Another approach is to invite such sites to the workshop.
Les has sent HostFinder.pl to Johari to possibly assist in finding hosts. There appears to be a problem with the Google query. After the meeting Les sent Johari a fix to HostSearcher.pl. Les also sent the documentation on the raw data format to Johari.
Funding/Proposals
Johari reported that the FRGS proposal had been accepted. It is for 75K MRs (~$35K). It is for 5 people.
Badrul is putting together a proposal fro an outreach program. It is similar to Johari's FRGS proposal. It will be used to expand the monitoring hosts.
The Next step in funding is to go for bigger research funding, such as LRGS or eScience. We can use the upcoming workshop (1 specific session) to brainstorm and come up with such proposal. We need to do some groundwork before that as well. Johari will take the lead in putting together 1/2 page descriptions of the potential research projects.
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At the last meeting, we agreed that the projects we have been gathering should be divided into Development and Research. Since the last meeting Les did this, see Potential PingER Projects .
UNIMAS
There is a problem with the UNIMAS traceroute. It appears both in pinger.unimas.my and in the Raspberry. It appears pinger.unimas.my is behind a NAT that is not passing the traceroute UDP probes. Other hosts at UNIMAS are not seeing the problem, so Johari believes it may have to do with the IPTABLES in pinger.unimas.my. Traceroute using the -I option (send the probes using ICMP rather than UDP) seems to work (but needs root access). Thus it would appear not to be in the return (ICMP "time exceeded") response. The probes (when not using the -I option are UDP packets using sequentially ports 33434 - 33465 for up to 30 hops). It is possible that ports > some number may be blocked. Update Johari, Anjum. Johari talked to Imran of the UNIMAS Computation Center to discuss the IP address configuration mismatch on private and public addresses
Johari has set up a guest account for Anjum. Anjum logged on and reported some concerns about addresses and interfaces not matching. He does not believe it is due to the Load Balancer. The traceroute/ping server is important for the TULIP trilateration project and also understanding routing within and from Malaysia.
It would help to have an MoU between SLAC and UTM. Based on DOE current MOU policy, using the UNIMAS MOU format will not work. SLAC's legal folks also do not think that merely adding additional parties to the current MOU will work either. The new DOE policy will require a new approval. We may be able to get DOE approval of a Work for Others agreement. To do a WFO agreement we would need, at a minimum:
- A detailed project description describing the activities each party will perform
- A description of the deliverables SLAC will provide
- A schedule with completion dates for the activities
- The key personnel and contact information for both parties
- The term for performance of the project activities
- An explanation of the unique capabilities SLAC will provide to the project not available elsewhere
- An explanation how the project is compatible with existing SLAC program(s)
- An explanation how the project enhances the mission of SLAC
Assuming we can get these issues addressed, our legal folks think we could seek DOE approval and enter into an agreement with these other universities. We need to hear back from UTM and UM whether we need/want to pursue this further. It will probably be a considerable effort. UTM & UM will need to address 1. We all need to think about 3. 4 is easy, 2 is doable, 7 and 8 are tricky.
There is a bug in http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/connectivity.pl?monitor=pinger.fsktm.um.edu.my&rawdata=www.aiu.edu.my&format=tsv&
. It gives: Content-type: text/html -rw-rw-r-- 1 pinger iepm 245175 Apr 13 01:08 /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/hep/data/pinger.fsktm.um.edu.my/ping-2013-04-12.txt.gz Les needs to look at connectivity.pl
Les has sent documentation on the PingER raw data format to JohariLes has sent HostFinder.pl to Johari to possibly assist in finding hosts. There appears to be a problem with the Google query.
UTM
The UTM Pinger site is http://pinger.fsksm.utm.my/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl to get the data. .
Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia.
We should discuss:
There was a long discussion on traceroute from UTM at the last PingER collaboration meeting. Badrul has contacts at MYREN and will use them to investiate the routing and where some of the routers are actually located. It is peculiar that a tracerouter from UTM to www.unimas.my when used with a time out after 45 seconds just gets the following hosts
1 161.139.68.25
2 10.110.1.67
3. 161.139.248.254
4. 161.139.244.65
whereas with a timeout of 90 seconds it gets the same 1st 4 hops and then
5 161.139.245.254 in < 3ms
6 161.139.251.103 in < 3ms
I.e. the 5th and 6th hop respond in way < 45secs.
One gets the same result from the command line.
All of these hosts are in the UTM autonomous domain
A possibility is that the measurements were made at different times and so the routing changed.
It would be interesting to skip the first 5 or 6 hops using the traceroute -f 6 option from the command line. Also make traceroutes with the 2 time outs at the same timeIt is not easy to find such sites in those states. Obvious targets are universities, for example UUM in Kedah and UNIMAP in Perlis, but those sites are not ping-able. One way is to approach these universities and explain to them about PingER project and request for the ping packet to be enable.
UM
Since the traceroute is working, "we" can start to make a routing study similar to https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Routing+from+UNIMAS. Badrul has a student who will be working on the case study and will coordinate with Saqib at UTM and Johari at UNIMAS to combine results and to put together a paper for the Malaysian ISI Journal probably around the end of June - Progress?. There was no progress reported on this.
NUST
Raja has mailed to the SLAC International Studies Office his documents towards the DS-2019 process. (3/29/2013). They were submitted to the Stanford campus Bechtel international center 4/4/2013. We await campus to create the DS-2019 documents(s). Once Raja has heard that they are ready, we will pick up and send to Rajabeing sent to him. Typical turnaround is a few days (< 2 weeks).
Abdullah will be visiting Islamabad, he has been invited by Anjum to visit NUST.
Anjum reported he sent Les a proposal he is planning to send to HEC. Les has not seen it. Anjum will resend.
PingER at SLAC
Les has been invited to give a general colloquiam at SLAC on the Internet where it came from, challenges and how it is performing. the latter section will report some PingER case studies and measurements.
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Raja is experimenting with using different alpha values as well as different target landmarks in Europe, America and Pakistan. So far the results of using a constant alpha value and variable alpha values based on RTT are quite similar. I am He is trying to find the conditions and situations under which using variable alpha values is better. (3/20/2013).
Raja has completed converting CGG the MATLAB script to Mathematica and used it to generate some input files for Pakistan and Europe. However using the alpha values (function of both region and RTT value) found through the alpha analysis the distances were underestimates in some cases. He is working on finding the cause and possible solution. Did you get an answer?
Potential projects
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