Page History

...

See: http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php

Need to add Umar - Johari

Attendees

Invitees:

Wajahat Hussain (SEECS) (may not be able to join); Saqib; Johari (may not be able to join);  Adib-, Saqib (GZHU)+; Johari (UNIMAS)?;  Adib (UUM)+; Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul (Ubru)+, Les+, Bebo+(in UK 8hours ahead of Pacific Summer time), Umar-+

+ Confirmed attendance

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

? Individual emails sent

Actual Attendees

Wajahat, Saqib, Adib, Charnsak, Umar, Bebo, Les

Others

Administration

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

Amity (Updated 5/28/2018)

• Their PingER MA is up and running and we are successfully gathering some data.  
  • However, there is a problem with not being able to find data in the requested time window.
  • There is also a problem with a missing beacons.txt.
  • Les i is working with Amity
• The Android version of the PingER MA is now looking at how to store the data and set up a proxy.
  • We are looking at how to store the data and set up a proxy 

...

• • , emails sent May 28th and June 3rd, 2018.
    • Need to load the most recent version of gathering application (ping_data.pl) to assist in diagnosing problem. 
      • It has been loaded
      • However, now I cannot  gather data or diagnose problems since there is no access to pingeramity.in/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl.
    • Check if Amity can upload beacons.txt table from SLAC.  They say they can.
• The Android version of the PingER MA 
  • We are looking at how to store the data and set up a proxy 

Bebo (No updates: 3/8/2018, 5/3/2018)

Looking into moving PingER to a "blockchain" database good for decentralizing distribution of data. Monitoring sites would then be able to write to a distributed ledger. This would change the architecture to a more peer to peer architecture. It helps with continuity of PingER since reduces dependence on a single site (SLAC). See Block Chain in Future PingER Projects. Bebo sent several references to Saqib who has looked at them. We could start with real-time data without including the whole archive, i.e. in parallel to the continued centrally managed archive. It would be a private Blockchain and hence not be as compute intensive as a public blockchain.  Johari is also interested and will follow up with Bebo and Saqib. Saqib gave an outstanding presentation at Guangzhou. There were a lot of discussions. Saqib has submitted to IEEE transactions and should hear mid May if it has been accepted. The conference is in September. Saqib and Bebo will discuss the next steps. Saqib will try and find a graduate student to work on it Bebo's impression is that Saqib will lead in putting the ides in his paper into practice. Saqib will need some students.  Saqib's boss is going to the NY City meeting.

Thailand (Updated 6/3/2018)

Charnsak also has an  IPv6 PingER MA working at UBRU. The nodename is now consistent. At a later stage we may need to figure out how to automatically support IPv6 beacons without messing up MA's that do not have IPv6 capability.

He is using ~ For his IPv6 monitoring Charnsak is using ~ 100 IPv6 targets from Saqib. They are in the<HostList>.

Charnsak is looking at a host in Chan Parsa province in Laos as a potential site for a PingER MA.  Is there any progress?

Charnsak would like to have write access to parts of the PingER Wiki site. Les investigated and it appears this can be done, even if Charsack does not have a SLAC account. Les and sent Charnsak the relevant information after the previous meeting.  Was this successful?

UUM (Updated 6/7/2018)

Regarding the paper " Socioeconomic Development indices and their Reflection on Internet Performance in the ASEAN Countries ", Adib tried the Elsevier Telecommunications journal. They responded and Adib commented:

1. insufficient understanding of the complexities in the cauality argumentation and related findings. 

   Adib responds: we have addressed IEEE access reviewers' comments carefully. complexities and even  validation can be further enhanced, but our data is a bit limited, we have only ten values  for each index. We have no data available for ALL indices in 2017 (the year this study was conducted), not even 2016. Values of all social economic indices re only available in 2015. I would suggest to consider this point in our next paper, where we can update our internet performance data to 2018, and hopefully other indices data are available as well.

2. the relevant previous literature is not well addressed 

    Adib responds: Actually, we reduced LR session to minimize the paper size so it can meet the journal requirements. Adding more LR can be done, but then the size will be increased again. In fact, not many close and recent papers were published in this particular area. so it is not necessary to add more LR, especially we are not comparing our final model with them. 

3. As a minor but still disturbing deficiency, references to the cited papers are incomplete. 
   Adib agrees and its is already amended

Adib will submit the paper to World Development: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/world-development

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 media and  government sites. There was no update 3/29/2018, or 5/3/2018. Any update?

NUST: (Updated 5/3/2018))

• 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.

UAF/GHZU (Updated 5/5/2018))

He has written a very nice paper on blockchain and its potential use for PingER storage, reviewed by Les and Bebo (also see above under Bebo). Has it been submitted/accepted?

IPv6 node in Beijing is up and running for the last 3 weeks but not available from outside China. Does this host have a name or what is its Iv6 Address (is the latter  2001:da8:270:2018:f816:3eff:fef3:bdf3)? Is it possible to make it accessible from say SLAC (134.79.0.0/16)?

Saqib has run Umar's scripts to compare ping vs TCP. It took about 4 days and Umar has the results.

Saqib has noted that the RTTs from SLAC to China tend to be greater than those from SLAC to S. E. and South Asia.  Looking at the monthly avg RTTs from SLAC to: Japan, China, S. E. Asia and South Asia. Les does not see this, it needs further investigation. Below are the RTTs from http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl. The Directivity is described in http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/tutorial.html#directness. It is a metric to identify the directness of the connection between 2 nodes at known locations. Directness values close to one mean the path between the hosts follows a roughly great circle route. Values much smaller than 1 mean the path is very indirect. 

PingER at SLAC (Updated 5/5/2018)

Umar looking at extending the comparison IPv6 vs IPv4 ping RTTs and TCP vs ICMP/ping RTTs. See Towards Analysis of ICMP vs TCP Ping Latencies. 

• See Towards Analysis of ICMP vs TCP Ping Latencies - Umar

  • IPv6 results gathered using ping-vs-tcp.pl script. They are yet to be analyzed

    • Tests complete in less than a day; not many IPv6 addresses

    • About 56 nodes with IPv6 addresses, 14 of which responded with Npings

    • We essentially have a 14-point data set
  • IPv4 results gathered from SLAC. (Repeating Virginia Tech experiments.)
    • Complete batch may be downloaded here (approx. 24 MB)
    • Skimmed results; findings are pretty much the same as before
    • Identified relevant events in the network stack that highlight timing (_RECVFROM, _RECVMSG, _IP_RECV, _NETIF_RX etc.). Looking for instrumentation that enables us to measure timestamps. We also need to figure out how to determine whether ICMP & TCP traffic are treated differently? and then how to measure the difference?
      • perf-tools allows us to measure transport events
      • If we could assume that the path for ICMP & TCP through the network is the same, then the only difference between two (controlled) tests would be the time spent in the transport layers. This can be measured using perftools. 
      • However, such measurements must be made in a controlled environment where ICMP and TCP are treated the same. (I say so because some results — e.g., in East Asia and South Asia — clearly show that ICMP performs much worse than TCP.)
    • We would also need to cater for cross traffic and queuing delays. Given how small the differences are, one may argue that the variations in measurements are due to cross traffic. Perhaps we should start with controlled tests and then see if real world measurements reflect similar behavior.
  • We need to setup a test environment. We can either setup a bare-metal box or use a VM. 
    • I will see if I can arrange for a bare-metal box.

XSS vulnerability in traceroute.pl

• There is a modified version of the PingER traceroute.pl CGI script. The new version sanitizes the QUERY_STRING variables to prevent some just exposed cross-site-scripting (XSS, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting) vulnerabilities. It is recommended that you replace the existing traceroute.pl script at your site with the new version, i.e. get  (e.g. using wget) traceroute.pl from http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/traceroute/traceroute.pl and install in your CGI directory (often /var/www/cgi-bin or /usr/local/cgi-bin or /usr/lib/cgi-bin or /var/www/cgi-bin). You may need to make it executable with the command chmod a+x traceroute.pl. You can test it by loading the URL http://yourwebserver/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl. 

• Sent to  PINGER-DEV@LISTSERV.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU march 31st, 2018.

PingER IPV6 support

• Les added an item to the pingtable.pl form to enable the ability to select IPv4 or IPv6 measurements or both.

Meeting with Amazon Web Services

• Dr Ali Khayam (ex NUST) is now at Amazon.  He has a colleague at Amazon (Awais Nemet) who heads the External Network Services group for AWS. Awais is kicking off many projects in the Internet monitoring space and Ali recommended that Awais talks to Les to learn about the experiences of operating Pinger and leveraging the data that Pinger generated.  Les updated the PingER front page at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/)  so he could  walk Awais through PingERthem. If you have suggestions for example better logos at the bottom of http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/ or other links, please let Les know.

   

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Thursday, June 7th 9pm Pacific time; Friday, June 8th, 2018  9:00am Pakistan time; 12:00noon Malaysian & Guangzhou time; and 11am Thailand time.

...

the <HostList> of the Ubra PingER MA. It can be seen from http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl?file=average_rtt&by=by-node&size=100&tick=monthly&from=TH.UBRU.CS.AC.PINGER6&to=WORLD&ex=none&only=all&ipv=all&dataset=hep&percentage=any. It is still running smoothly.

Charnsak is looking at a host in Chan Parsa province in Laos as a potential site for a PingER MA. Charnsak just got approved to make contact with the Champasak University. He expects to set up the MA in the next 4-5 months. It also depends on the partner university. 

Charnsak would like to have write access to parts of the PingER Wiki site. Les investigated and it appears this can be done, even if Charsack does not have a SLAC account. Les sent Charnsak the relevant information after the previous meeting.  Charnsak filled out the form and submitted. However, it went to the wrong person for approval.  This has now been fixed and he should be able to move forward. Charnsak has tested and it is working.

UUM (Updated 6/7/2018)

Regarding the paper " Socioeconomic Development indices and their Reflection on Internet Performance in the ASEAN Countries ", Adib tried the Elsevier Telecommunications journal. They responded and Adib commented:

1. insufficient understanding of the complexities in the causality argumentation and related findings. 

   Adib responds: we have addressed IEEE access reviewers' comments carefully. complexities and even validation can be further enhanced, but our data is a bit limited, we have only ten values for each index. We have no data available for ALL indices in 2017 (the year this study was conducted), not even 2016. Values of all social economic indices are only available in 2015. I would suggest considering this point in our next paper, where we can update our internet performance data to 2018, and hopefully other indices data are available as well.

2. the relevant previous literature is not well addressed 

    Adib responds: Actually, we reduced LR session to minimize the paper size so it can meet the journal requirements. Adding more LR can be done, but then the size will be increased again. In fact, not many close and recent papers were published in this particular area. so it is not necessary to add more LR, especially we are not comparing our final model with them. 

3. As a minor but still disturbing deficiency, references to the cited papers are incomplete. 
   Adib agrees and it is already amended

Adib will submit the paper to World Development: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/world-development

We were unable to gather data from pinger.uum.edu.my. It appears to have been fixed.

NUST: (Updated 5/3/2018))

• 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.
• Wajahat says they will get these nodes up. These have been good nodes. They just need the weekly push. NUST will push them soon.

UNIMAS (No update 3/8/2018, 5/3/2018)

•  The web page at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php was not accessibe also the web page on joining was not accessible,  http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/join.php.
  • It was a faulty network card which was replaced. It was an old machine (10 years old) and finding compatible network card was a bit of a problem

UAF/GHZU (Updated 5/5/2018))

Saqib submitted the Camera ready paper on  “A Blockchain-based Decentralized Data Storage and Access Framework for PingER” and it has been accepted in Trustcom2018.

Two previously accepted papers are now online on the following links.

• The paper titled “Detecting Anomalies from End-to-end Internet Performance Measurements ( PingER ) using Cluster-Based Local Outlier Factor” is online on IEEE portal. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8367380/ . This paper is not available in SLAC repository.  Les will follow up.
•  The paper titled “Internet Performance Analysis of South Asian Countries using End-to-End Internet Performance Measurements” is online on IEEE portal. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8367431/ . This paper is available in SLAC repository (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/17000/slac-pub-17205.pdf). However, without doi no and other necessary details. Les will follow up.

IPv6 node in Beijing is up and running for the last 7 weeks but not available from outside China. It does not appear possible to make the host accessible outside China. We are looking at alternates (e.g. using the anonymous FTP server at SLAC as a proxy) that may also be relevant for PingER on Android gathering of data.

Discussion item

Saqib sent an email to the team:

In early years of PingER, the framework was designed to check the latency and other Internet performance metrics between CERN and SLAC to facilitate the data transfer between the two sites.

I am thinking, is there any possibility to use PingER to monitor the health of the Bitcoin blockchain network? Since the latency is critical in Bitcoin blockchain network as all the incentives depend on the propagation of transactions and mined blocks. Thus, I am only interested in measuring the latency to check its effect on the propagation of the transactions and mined block among different mining pools. I think if we can do such thing on a historical basis as PingER already does for the Internet, it will increase the worth of the framework and its usability.

Maybe a few test experiments can guide us to a good research paper. I am not sure about the feasibility idea, therefore, need your kind feedback

Umar responded:

PingER at SLAC (Updated 6/7/2018)

Umar looking at extending the comparison IPv6 vs IPv4 ping RTTs and TCP vs ICMP/ping RTTs. 

• See Towards Analysis of ICMP vs TCP Ping Latencies - Umar
  • Looked into Traffic Differentiation - Rate Limiting vs. Traffic Prioritization (QoS)
    • Conclusions: 
      • Min RTT essentially reflects fixed delay, while average RTT subsumes variations and path load
        
      • TCP Segment drops manifest as large increases in delay
        
      • QoS can be implemented in at least two ways: 
        • When priorities are implemented, ICMP packets will only be dropped if ICMP quota is full and link is congested, otherwise ICMP traffic is allowed to go beyond quota
        • When rate-limits are implemented, ICMP packets will be dropped when ICMP quota is met, even if links are not congested
      • Path loads dictate latency estimates: With weighted QoS implementations, loaded links depress ICMP
    • Found relevant papers and technical reports. The intent here is to understand the components of latency to help with the evaluation.

      • Y. Zhang, N. Duffield, V. Paxson, S. Shenker, On the Constancy of Internet Path Properties, in ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop 2001

      • A. Acharya, J. Saltz, A Study of Internet Round-Trip Delay, Univ of Maryland, Tech Rep. CS-TR-3736

      • M. Allman, V. Paxson, On Estimating End-to-End Network Path Properties, in ACM SIGCOMM 1999

      • V. Paxson, G. Almes, J. Mathis, Framework for IP Performance Metrics

    • Setup NeuBot and experimented with tests but wasn't able to find useful examples of traffic differentiation (see https://www.measurementlab.net/tests/)
    • Skimmed Glasnost to understand traffic shaping (see http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/glasnost.php and https://github.com/marcelscode/glasnost)
    • [Not Relevant] Miscellaneous notes on ICMP Traceroutes, MPLS tunneling & ICMP (see http://cluepon.net/ras/traceroute.pdf), Measuring Performance

  • IPv6 results gathered using ping-vs-tcp.pl script. About 56 nodes with IPv6 addresses, 14 of which responded with Npings

  • IPv4 results gathered from SLAC and Virginia Tech
    • SLAC's batch may be downloaded here (approx. 24 MB)
    • Skimmed results; findings are pretty much the same as before
• Pending
  • Identified relevant events in the network stack that highlight timing (_RECVFROM, _RECVMSG, _IP_RECV, _NETIF_RX etc.). Looking for instrumentation that enables us to measure timestamps. We also need to figure out how to determine whether ICMP & TCP traffic are treated differently? and then how to measure the difference?
    • perf-tools allows us to measure transport events
    • If we could assume that the path for ICMP & TCP through the network is the same, then the only difference between two (controlled) tests would be the time spent in the transport layers. This can be measured using perftools. 
    • However, such measurements must be made in a controlled environment where ICMP and TCP are treated the same. (I say so because some results — e.g., in East Asia and South Asia — clearly show that ICMP performs much worse than TCP.)
  • We would also need to cater for cross traffic and queuing delays. Given how small the differences are, one may argue that the variations in measurements are due to cross traffic. Perhaps we should start with controlled tests and then see if real world measurements reflect similar behavior.
  • We need to setup a test environment. We can either setup a bare-metal box or use a VM. 
    • I will see if I can arrange for a bare-metal box.

PingER IPV6 support

• Les added an item to the pingtable.pl form to enable the ability to select IPv4 or IPv6 measurements or both.

Meeting with Amazon Web Services

• Dr Ali Khayam (ex NUST) is now at Amazon.  He has a colleague at Amazon (Awais Nemet) who heads the External Network Services group for AWS. Awais is kicking off many projects in the Internet monitoring space and Ali recommended that Awais talks to Les to learn about the experiences of operating Pinger and leveraging the data that Pinger generated.  Les updated the PingER front page at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/)  so he could walk Awais through PingER. 

   

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Thursday, July 5th 9pm Pacific time; Friday, July 6th, 2018  9:00am Pakistan time; 12:00noon Malaysian & Guangzhou time; and 11am Thailand time.

...

Old information

NUST (moved here 6/29/2018)

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. Emailed Wajahar 6/3/2018 asking for update. He responded "There is no call yet. There was one last year. May be change in the US-Pak policy. Just a guess."

UUM (moved here 6/29/2018)

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 media and government sites. There was no update 3/29/2018, or 5/3/2018.

GZHU (moved here 3/8/2018)

...