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Invitees: Anjum, Kashif, Johari, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul+, Hanan, Fidah12Fidah, Saqib+, Les+, Raja+, Umar+ and Bebo+
+ attended. There was some trouble with Les understanding Skype at the start, so we missed connecting Raja who was available. I have added his email to the notes below. In future if anyone is available but is not connected call rlacottrell and Les will add them to the existing call.
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Meeting time & date: Thursday 21 February 2013 7:30pm Pacific Daylight Time, Frida 22 February 2013 8:30am Pakistan time, Friday February 2013 11:30 am Malaysian time.
General
Johari is setting up a web landing site for the Malaysian collaboration. The start is at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger. It will contain:
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Should we set up a Doodle page, see http://doodle.com/?locale=en (http://doodle.com/?locale=en*).?
Funding
Johari has submitted a proposal for FRGS (Fundamental Research Grant Scheme). There are 5 members of the proposal (5 is the max). Johari decided to get 2 more people from the group in UNIMAS to join the PingER project, thus we are unable to include our counterparts in UM and UTM (Dr Abdullah and Prof Hanan). We can go for a bigger project such as the eScience or LRGS (Long-term Research Grant Scheme) which can accommodate a larger number of people, more funding and encourage cross institutions collaboration.
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traceroute -I www,cern.ch works which suggest the UDP probes to UDP ports 33434 - 33465 are being blocked. Saqib is working with the IT department to understand. The output is different from the web browser and the command line. The command line using traceroute www.cern.ch looks fine. The web server stops after the 4th hop. The web server issues the command traceroute -m 30 -q 3 137.138.144.168. The m is the max number of hops, the q is the number of probes per hop, 137.138.144.168 is the IP address of www.cern.ch. This also works from the command line. It could be a timeout problem (it would be good to time traceroute -m 30 -q 3 137.138.144.168 command). Saqib has provided the web server logs and nothing stands out. It may be a timing issue, Saquib Saqib will try running traceroute.pl from the command line and timing it.
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Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia. MIU looks interesting.The normal RTT to Malayisan hosts from UM and UMT is a few tens of ms, but to MIU its is > 100ms. The route goes via Hong Kong which accounts for the delay. Why does the route go via HK? Saqib needs to start documenting what he is finding and his results (RTTs, min-Rtts, Directivity, traceroutes) and conclusions. Another anomaly might be why SWU in the Philippines has long RTTs from UTM & UNIMAS but not UM. Also why does UPSI have a long RTT from UNIMAS but not UM or UTM, is it simply the distance from Borneo to Peninula Malaysia, look at the Directivity.
UM
Dr Nor Badrul Anuar Jumaat has installed PingER on a cloud at UM. The machines are virtualized and running Ubuntu Linux. The name and address of the server is pinger.fsktm.um.edu.my (202.185.107.238). Anjum pointed out that at NUST they are having a problem with a virtual machine running pinger2.pl and the /tmp/ disk space filling up. Anjum is exploring this in more detail, so at the moment it is just a head's up. Johari has sent Kashif's workshop presentations to Dr. Nor. The UM monitoring host has been added to the NODELIST PingER meta data base at SLAC and the <HostList> for Malaysian and S.E Asian hosts has been added to the pinger.xml file at UM. We need to get the latest pinger2.pl installed. Since the traceroute is working, Badrul can will work with some of his students to make a routing study similar to https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Routing+from+UNIMAS. he plans to have something for the meeting in 2 weeks time
NUST
From Arshad: Rector has agreed to support one person visit to SLAC. Raja has been nominated. He has sent a cv to Les and has filled out the DoE form. Les crafted the invitation and it has been sent to upper management for signature Dec 21, 2012.Les briefed the SLAC Cybersecurity person on 1/10/2013. He has also filled out another form for hosting visitors from sensitive nations. Les has taken and passed the training on hosting visitors from sensitive nations. Cybersecurity want more details on what Raja can access and Les has provided it. SLAC CyberSecurity say they do not approve or disapprove visitors so I have requested (2/8/2013) the CIO to sign and pass to the CEO for signature. Raja has completed his paperwork and is ready to submit. As soon as Les hears the letter has been signed by the CIO (and before it is sent to Raja), Les will get back to Raja to proceed. He has sent 2 reminders to the cybersecrity person and engaged the CIO in the latest.
Raja reports that the code is working fine now without any underestimates. The problem was that he was using Alpha values that were above 80% of the data points (in Alpha Analysis) for each RTT range but now I have changed that to 95%.
He tried to geolocated a landmark in Europe i.e.icfamon.dl.ac.uk using both a fixed Alpha value (0.55 in this case) that was 95% above overall and also using a set of Alpha values which were used as a function of the RTT value. For the fixed Alpha value case the error distance was 746KM where as for the variable Alpha case the error was 530KM. For this test case, using Alpha values as a function of RTT looks promising. In both cases however the Error of geolocation is significant, this is probably due to the fact the target was not in the Convex Hull of the landmarks that responded. It turns out we should exclude icfamon.dl.ac.uk since we uncertain to with 150 miles where it s located (near Oxford or near Liverpool). Raja will repeat and process for different targets and different regions and see how well that goes.
Raja also reports that there are a lot of PlanetLab landmarks being used by reflector in Europe that have the same Lat Long (51 , 9). The min RTT of these landmarks to the target varied from 20ms to 45ms which would imply that they are not at the same location? Shouldn't we avoid using servers as landmarks unless we know their exact location? We recommend not using any such sites or sites that have no digits after the decimal point.
Potential projects
Ipv6
With Malaysia moving quickly to IPv6 (already Nava at USM has sent Les an IPv6 address that he recommends monitoring), converting PingER (especially the gathering, analysis) work with IPv6 is an interesting problem. Anjum believes he could provide an undergraduate to start on this.
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Coordinate and lead the installation of PingER monitoring at multiple Malayisan sites
Build and install a new http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/pingER-2.0.2.tar.gz file with the improved version of pinger2.pl
PingER at SLAC
The annual report to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity (SCIC) has also been completed.
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