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

Requested Johari  to add DrJohara added Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul <charnsak.s@ubru.ac.th>, Skype ID charnsaksrisawatsakul. Faculty of Computer Science Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University, Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand,  web site http://www.charnsak.com to the file.

Attendees

Invitees:

Wajahat Hussain+, ajmal.farooq@seecs.edu.pk, Muhammad Anas Abrar (SEECS); Saqib+, Aqsa (UAF); Johari+, Adnan Khan (UNIMAS);  Badrul,  Ridzuan, Ibrahim (UM); (UTM); Adib?, Fatima (UUM); Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul+, Les+, Bebo+

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? Individual emails sent

Actual Attendees

Adib, Bebo, Charnsak, Johari, saqib, Wajahat, Les

Others

Administration

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Looking into moving PingER to a "block chainblockchain" database good for decentralize distribution of data. Hot topic. Monitoring sites would then be able to write to a distributed ledger. This would change the architecture to a more peer to peer architecture. Help It helps with continuity of PingER . Might be compelling.  since reduces dependence on a single site (SLAC). See Block Chain in Future PingER Projects. Saqib is interestedUpdate?  

Wajahat mentions "Bebo mentioned things related to bitcoins.  One of Wajahat's colleagues (Dr Taha Ali) is working in this area. He will be giving a course on Block Chain to MS students at NUST next quarter. He wants to know how we are planning to use bitcoins for pinger data. A little detail will be helpful."  

  • Bebo responded: "The discussion dealt with the possible use of block chain technology with PingER independent of bitcoin. However, an understanding of bitcoin applications and how they interact with a blockchain would probably be useful." 

  • Bebo would be interested in the syllabus for the Block Chain course. Wjahat provided Taha's email address (taha.ali@seecs.edu.pk) and will put Taha in contact with Bebo.

Thailand

We now have two MAs in Thailand: pinger.cs.ubru.ac.th (in NE Thailand) and pinger.rmutsv.ac.th (in Bangkok). The former has just been added. Both are working, SLAC is gathering data and the analysis is now available.    Dr. Charnsak fixed the inbound firewall rule to enable pings.

Charnsak is interested in using the PingER data. It could be used for a case study on Internet performance within Thailand, and from say the US to Thailand. Also a comparison of the performance of the two MAs in Thailand would be interesting.  A list of papers and presentations related to PingER is available. Some case studies are seen below:

Another possibility would be to compare the RTTs from ping/ICMP with those from TCP SYN ACK delays as seen from Thailand for both ipv4 and ipv6. See Validating ICMP ping measurements against TCP nping measurements.

UUM (No input from Adib 12/7/2017)

  • The paper on Internet Performance and its Reflection on Socioeconomic Development in the ASEAN Countries to IEEE Access.

    • The paper was not accepted :( despite some positive reviews, two reviewers accept the paper and only one reject it. Anyway, I have been working on a more rigorous analysis to resolve the correlation/causation doubt (to answer David comments) and the new analysis is ready.  Adib needs a few days to update our paper with the new analysis then will share with us to comment and advise.
      • He has been working with a statistician to identify correlations between Internet performance (IP) and ICT Development Index (IDI), Human Development Index (HDI), Fertility, GDP, and the Happy Planet Index (HPI).
      • They then look at the normality of the data. All except GDP pass the normality test. For GDP they use Spearman's non-parametric correlation, while Pearson Correlation is used for the rest.
      • There are strong positive correlations for IDI and HDI, a strong negative correlation between Fertility rate and a moderate correlation for HPI. GDP also has a  moderate correlation
      • It then looks at the cause-effect relationship using regression.
      • Finally, it comes up with a model of the form:

        IP = 2724.288 + 0.008GDP + 275.904 IDI -3238.298 HDI – 220.264 – 8.084HPI

      • And they test its predictive behavior using various statistical tests. It looks very good.

      • Adib is finalizing the paper and hopes to complete by the end of the week 9/25/2017. Progress?
  • There was  a problem pinging the MA pinger.uum.edu.my.  It is no working as promised.

  • Adib has sent PingER MA invitation to Nigerian person who used to be a student at UUM. He is awaiting a response.

  • 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.

NUST: Updates 12/8/2017

One student is working on: Data Mining doing research on PingER data. He will be using Hadoop on a supercomputer at NUST.

  • The student is getting to know Hadoop.  Once the student is comfortable with the tools we can start applying the tools to pinger data. he is working on Hadoop. Student is working on exams at the moment, Wajahat will contact student

Wajahat is trying to contact the sick Pakistani MA nodes but the current week is exam week. He will give detailed response next week. So Les has paused Disabling (see below). We can always restore an MA for testing or when it is once again reliable.  Wajahat proposes to get  a list of the new Universities in Pakistan and contact them encouraging them to joining participate in PingER and set up MA. He will start next week when the students are available.

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. Wjahat 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. For cyber the main things we could think of were: 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), host can respond to ping but applications do not work.  Fear of misuse of pings can result in the system administrator, network administrator or cyber security blocking pings. 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.

 
We were unable to gather data from:
  • aup.seecs.edu.pk  host is pingable, Wajahat still trying, not given up. Still down 4/15/2017, 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017, 9/16/2017 (does not ping), 1/8/2018 (pings). Contacted and they will fix the problem soon.10/24/2017. Should we Disable?
  • cae.seecs.edu.pk working again as of 3/6/2017. Down since March 17, 2017. Down 7/3/2017, Down 8/11/2017 did not ping, 9/16/2017 pings but unable to gather any data. Reconfigured 9/19/2017. Intermittent access this month (10/24/2017). Worked for a day after configuring 11/28/2017. Worked Jan 1-5, no response Jan 6-7.
  • kinnaird.seecs.edu.pl pings but unable to gather data 8/11/2017, unable to ping, Contacted. 9/16/2017.  Unable to gather data. Contacted fix problem soon. 10/24/2017. Disabled 11/30/2017.
  • namal.seecs.edu.pk (host is not pingable). Institution unreachable from start, we are trying to locate the person in charge, fingers crossed (Wajahat 1/10/206). Working 2/1/2018, still working 3/20/2017. Down since April 1st 2017. Down 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017. 9/16/2016 pings unable to gather data. Contact person missing. No data 10/24/2017. Unable to access this node. Disabled 11/30/2017
  • nukimain.seecs.edu.pk down since March 24th, 2017. Down 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017,9/16/2017 unable to ping, still unable to ping or gather data. No contact information. 10/24/2017. Disabled 11/30/2017.
  • 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. Do we disable 11/30/2017? Stlll nothing 1/8/2018. 
  • pinger.vu.edu.pk down since May 22nd, down 7/3/2017. Problem with missing XML/Simple.pm missing. Unable to gather data, pings 8/11/2017 and 9/16/2017.  Reconfigured 9/19/2017.  No data to gather 10/24/2017, it pings OK, however there is no data in the 200 OK response to http://pinger.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl? Port 80 is responding. http://pinger.vu.edu.pk/  takes you a front page for the Virtual University of Pakistan.The link to http://pinger.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?choice=yes works (a bit slow), however the link to Get PingER data (i.e. ping_data.pl) does not work. Person who started left, current people  do not respond. Do we Disable 11/30/2017? Still nothing 1/8/2018.

They are focusing on the hosts they can ping. In many cases the researcher has left and others do not see the purpose. Wajahat will keep trying pointing out the value for international research and papers.

UNIMAS (Johari unable to attend 9/21/2017, 10/2617 12/07/2017 so no update)

  • Johari attended a workshop organized by UNESCO about experience in China and Malaysia on analysis and visualization. He talked to several researchers from China. He will send a paper to a journal to see if there is interest.
  • Johari is teaching this semester, he will enter the Raspberry Pi image into Dropbox or Github in the next few days.  Bebo will follow up with Github information.
  • He is looking at updating the PingER Malaysia web site.
  • He has been unable to contact Hafiz to get MyREN monitor at UNIMAS working again. 
  • Writing a paper. Les will review and then Johari will submit. No progress 3/14/2017. Looking for a good journal 5/18/2017.

UAF/GHZU (Saqib)

Pinger.gzhu.edu.cn MA is down due to a possible security issue. Is there any progress 1/18/2018, can we assist?

Saqib submitted a project in CERNET to monitor the performance of  IPv6 network using PingERv6. He received the news that the project is accepted with 100K RMB. Now he has 2 accepted projects regarding PingER and total amount he has is near about 40K USD. Further, in his lab, three U1 servers have already arrived through another  grant for research purpose. We can also use them for our PingER project.

Also, Saqib submitted the PingER MA in a IPv6 based application contest organized by CERNET. They cleared the first round of the contest. Now in 2nd round, we have to show the running state of the project.

Therefore, the CERNET has given Saqib a IPv6 based CentOS 6.8 machine in cloud. Now he is  trying to deploy the PingER server on the machine. Lets see how it will work on IPv6 based network.

Saqib has made contact with John Pickard author of  "Quality of IPv6 Enablement of Universities: An International Study"  who has provided a list of about 125 Universities in about 60 countries hosting IPv6 sites. However many are proxies.  Les has suggested using perfSONAR (there are about 1000 and they all have lat longs in the sperfSONAR data base. Saqib is gatherin the list, then we will see how many have IPv6 addresses.

Les is also looking at other sources of IPv6 hosts, for example the PingER targets (for which we have the lat/longs) has about 40 IPv6 hosts that respond to pings

The paper title: " Internet Performance Analysis of South Asian Countries using End-to-end Internet Performance Measurements" is submitted in IEEE IUCC 2017 (http://trust.gzhu.edu.cn/conference/IUCC2017/). Camera ready paper is submitted. It has been accepted.

The paper title: " Detecting Anomalies from End-to-End Internet Performance Measurements (PingER) using Cluster Based Local Outlier Factor" is submitted in IEEE ISPA 2017 (http://trust.gzhu.edu.cn/conference/ISPA2017/). Camera ready paper is submitted. It has been accepted.

The paper title: " Missing Values Imputation in PingER Internet End-to-end Performance Measurements using k-nearest neighbors (k NN)" was not accepted in IMC 2017. He is updating the paper according to the reviewer’s comments. Hopefully, Saqib will submit it at some other venue. Not yet decided about the submission venue. Need some suggestions. Updated but not decided where to submit. Update 12/4/2017?

PingER MA at GZHU is now accessible publicly and is successfully gathering data and incorporated in PingER. It would make a good beacon, however it was not pingable 7/16/2017, sent email. Saqib is trying to convince the IT department to open the ping. No success yet. Hopefully in next 2 weeks.  (9/26/2016). Still not pingable 10/24/2017. No success. However, requested to move PingER to dual stack subnet to ping Ipv6 address space. In coming week, then will see what we can ping. Update 12/4/2017?

·       Also it may be related to Adib’s paper on Internet Performance and its Reflection on Socioeconomic Development in the ASEAN Countries that was submitted to IEEE and rejected.

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 manged archive. It would be a private Blockchain.  Joahari is also interested and will follow up with Bebo and Saqib.

Thailand

A possible project would be to compare the RTTs from ping/ICMP with those from TCP SYN ACK delays as seen from Thailand for both ipv4 and ipv6. See Validating ICMP ping measurements against TCP nping measurements. Les will send to Johari and Charnsak, the perl script (ping-vs-tcp.pl) he has written to make the measurements.

UUM (No input from Adib 12/7/2017)

  • Adib has updated the paper on Internet Performance and its Reflection on Socioeconomic Development in the ASEAN Countries to IEEE Access and sent to Les and Bebo for review. Then we will need to find a suitable place to publish.

  • The BIND paper ("BIND: An Indexing Strategy for Big Data Processing") is now online.  Adib will provide a URL or a copy of the paper so we can add it to papers related to PingER.

  • There was  a problem pinging the MA pinger.uum.edu.my.  It is now working as promised.

  • 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 indicatorsm social media and  government sites.

NUST: Updates 12/8/2017

One student is working on: Data Mining doing research on PingER data. He will be using Hadoop on a supercomputer at NUST.

  • The student is getting to know Hadoop.  Once the student is comfortable with the tools we can start applying the tools to pinger data. he is working on Hadoop. Student is working on exams at the moment, Wajahat will contact student

Wajahat is trying to contact the sick Pakistani MA nodes but the current week is exam week. He will give detailed response next week. So Les has paused Disabling (see below). We can always restore an MA for testing or when it is once again reliable.  Wajahat proposes to get  a list of the new Universities in Pakistan and contact them encouraging them to joining participate in PingER and set up MA. He will start next week when the students are available.

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. For cyber the main things we could think of were: 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), host can respond to ping but applications do not work.  Fear of misuse of pings can result in the system administrator, network administrator or cyber security blocking pings. 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.

 
We were unable to gather data from:
  • aup.seecs.edu.pk  host is pingable, Wajahat still trying, not given up. Still down 4/15/2017, 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017, 9/16/2017 (does not ping), 1/8/2018 (pings). Contacted and they will fix the problem soon.10/24/2017. They are non responsive as of Jan 19, 2018We will Disable
  • cae.seecs.edu.pk working again as of 3/6/2017. Down since March 17, 2017. Down 7/3/2017, Down 8/11/2017 did not ping, 9/16/2017 pings but unable to gather any data. Reconfigured 9/19/2017. Intermittent access this month (10/24/2017). Worked for a day after configuring 11/28/2017. Worked Jan 1-5, no response Jan 6-7. Working since Jan 9th 2018.
  • kinnaird.seecs.edu.pl pings but unable to gather data 8/11/2017, unable to ping, Contacted. 9/16/2017.  Unable to gather data. Contacted fix problem soon. 10/24/2017. Disabled 11/30/2017.
  • namal.seecs.edu.pk (host is not pingable). Institution unreachable from start, we are trying to locate the person in charge, fingers crossed (Wajahat 1/10/206). Working 2/1/2018, still working 3/20/2017. Down since April 1st 2017. Down 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017. 9/16/2016 pings unable to gather data. Contact person missing. No data 10/24/2017. Unable to access this node. Disabled 11/30/2017
  • nukimain.seecs.edu.pk down since March 24th, 2017. Down 7/3/2017, 8/11/2017,9/16/2017 unable to ping, still unable to ping or gather data. No contact information. 10/24/2017. Disabled 11/30/2017.
  • 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.
  • pinger.vu.edu.pk down since May 22nd, down 7/3/2017. Problem with missing XML/Simple.pm missing. It is working again as of  January 8th 2018.

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.

UNIMAS (Johari unable to attend 9/21/2017, 10/2617 12/07/2017 so no update)

  • 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 microSSD, and the latter varies. There may not be a solution.
  • He is looking at updating the PingER Malaysia web site.
  • He has been unable to contact Hafiz to get MyREN monitor at UNIMAS working again. There was a dicussion between Johari and Adib. Adib confirm Hafiz is still at MYREN, MYREN are moving locations which may have impact on some servers and availability of Hafiz.  Adib will try and contact Hafiz.

UAF/GHZU (Saqib)

Pinger.gzhu.edu.cn MA is down due to a possible security issue. Is there any progress 1/18/2018, can we assist?

Saqib submitted a project in CERNET to monitor the performance of  IPv6 network using PingERv6. He received the news that the project is accepted with 100K RMB. Now he has 2 accepted projects regarding PingER and total amount he has is near about 40K USD. Further, in his lab, three U1 servers have already arrived through another  grant for research purpose. We can also use them for our PingER project.  

Therefore, the CERNET has given Saqib a IPv6 based CentOS 6.8 machine in cloud. Now he is  trying to deploy the PingER server on the machine. Lets see how it will work on IPv6 based network.  This is a 2 year project.

Saqib has made contact with John Pickard author of  "Quality of IPv6 Enablement of Universities: An International Study"  who has provided a list of about 125 Universities in about 60 countries hosting IPv6 sites. However many are proxies.  Les has suggested using perfSONAR (there are about 1000 and they all have lat longs in the sperfSONAR data base. Saqib is gathering the list, then we will see how many have IPv6 addresses.

Les is also looking at other sources of IPv6 hosts, for example the PingER targets (for which we have the lat/longs) has about 40 IPv6 hosts that respond to pings. Another source is perfSONAR. Les has created an XML file of the perfSONAR host which Saqib is going to look at to see which are IPv6 pingable.

Les will send Saqib a list of PingER Beacon sites that respond to IPv6 pings.

The paper title: " Missing Values Imputation in PingER Internet End-to-end Performance Measurements using k-nearest neighbors (k NN)" was not accepted in IMC 2017. He is updating the paper according to the reviewer’s comments. Hopefully, Saqib will submit it at some other venue. Not yet decided about the submission venue. Need some suggestions. Updated but not decided where to submit. Update 12/4/2017?

Currently, no data is available on PingER on Android due to unavailability of the live IP address. No update 4/19/2017, 7/6/2017. Email sent to Sara Masood. No update 9/24/2017. Any update 10/24/2017. Update 12/4/2017? No progress 1/18/2018.

PingER at SLAC

Working with Saqib to test pinger2.pl to make it work with IPv6 servers and targets.

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