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The UBRU IPv4 PingER MA continues to function reliably. Charnsak isworking on an IPv6 also has an IPv6 PingER MA working at UBRU. He is downloading downloaded the latest version of pinger2.pl and will set up a set of IPv6 hosts in <HostList> in pinger.xml. There are a couple of fixes needed to make the node name consistent. At a later stage we will need to figure out how to automatically support IPv6 beacons without messing up MA's that do not have IPv6 capability.
He is using Beacons IPv6 targets from Saqib
Umar and Charnsak are working on making measurements from UBRU comparing ping/ICMP vs TCP RTTs. Just finished running yesterday after 4 days.
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UUM (Updated 5/3/2018)
Regarding the the paper " Socioeconomic Development indices and their Reflection on Internet Performance in the ASEAN Countries ", Adib has submitted the paper to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking because IEEE Access does not accept a resubmission of previously rejected paper. Even so, he explained to them that our new submission has a totally new contribution, but they do not take it. The paper status is under review.
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 indicators, social mediaand governmentsites. There is no update 3/29/2018.
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They have shortlisted candidates for the task of managing the Pakistani MAs.The students will be given a stipend. As of 4/30/2018, they are still waiting for new students. The interns have not joined the lab yet. So the progress is a little slow.
Wajahat proposes to get a list of the new Universities in Pakistan and contact them encouraging them to participate in PingER and set up MA. 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.
There is an upcoming grant call for projects between Pakistan and the US. Topics may be focused on cybersecurity, health, and education. It has not been announced yet. Wajahat will get the details and share them with the team as soon as they are available. It is interesting since getting a US partner appears to be a roadblock for many potential Pakistani responders. However, the topics may not be very related to PingER. NUST is looking at applying to set up a cyber lab. Getting the funding will be in competition with other Pakistani Universities.
For cyber the main things we could think of from PingER were: quantifying what fraction of hosts block pings, punching holes in firewalls to allow pings, how to misuse ping (e.g. ping-of-death, or using anomalous ping packets to deduce the OS etc. flood pings for DOS), the host can respond to ping but applications do not work. Fear of misuse of pings can result in the system administrator, network administrator or cybersecurity blocking pings. A possibility might be a study of what fraction of say working www/dns etc. apps (i.e. checking if a host responds to the relevant port) do not respond to pings. This could be by application, by country or by region etc. Also how to protect a remote pinger traceroute or server from being used in DOS attacks. As of 3/27/2018 there is no call so far. There was one last year, so Wajahat is expecting one.
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- 121.52.146.180 (kohat.edu.pk) down since Nov 22/2017. Wajahat recommends continuing at least until the new student is up to speed (3/8/2018). No data available 3/24/2018.
- cae.seecs.edu.pk last time we were able to gather any data was February 27th.
- 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. Still down February 28, 2018, await new student. (3/8/2018). No data 3/24/2018.
- pinger.isra.edu.pk unable to gather data since 3/6/2018, also does not ping.
UNIMAS (No update 3/8/2018, 5/3/2018)
- 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 micro SSD, and the latter varies. There may not be a solution. Do we give up?
- Johari is looking at updating the PingER Malaysia website (pinger.unimas.my)
- We have lost both MAs at UNIMAS
- Johari has been unable to contact Hafiz to get MyREN monitor at UNIMAS (perfsonar-unimas.myren.net.my) working again. There was a discussion between Johari and Adib. Adib confirms Hafiz is still at MYREN, MYREN are moving locations which may have an impact on some servers and availability of Hafiz. Adib will try and contact Hafiz.
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