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? Individual emails sent
Actual Attendees
Saqib, Charnsak, Les
Others
Administration
Amity (Updated 5/3/2018)
- Their PingER MA is up and running and we are successfully gathering data. We are working on the reliability.
They have made progress on the Android version of the PingER MA.
- They now automatically get the updated the Beacon list
- We are looking at how to store the data and set up a proxy
Bebo (No update 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.
Thailand (Updated 5/3/2018)
The UBRU IPv4 PingER MA continues to function reliably. Charnsak isworking on an IPv6 PingER AM 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 ~ 100 IPv6 targets from Saqib. They are in the<HostList>.
Umar and Charnsak are working on Umar and Charnsak are working on making measurements from UBRU comparing ping/ICMP vs TCP RTTs.
Les is pursuing the possibility of an MoU with SLAC legal, the legal contact was on maternity leave so there was a delay. He has returned and been reminded and is looking at it. He says "The process for foreign MOUs has unfortunately gotten more complex per new DOE requirements." It can take a long time to go through the process. SLAC has not submitted any MoUs in the last 5 years. Les is still pushing forward and sent an outline to his bosses. This is not looking hopeful.
UUM (No input from Adib 12/7/2017, 3/8/2018)
Just finished running yesterday after 4 days.
Charnsak is looking at a host in Chan Parsa province in Laos as a potential site for a PingER MA.
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 meeting.
Les is pursuing the possibility of an MoU with SLAC legal, the legal contact was on maternity leave so there was a delay. He has returned and been reminded and is looking at it. He says "The process for foreign MOUs has unfortunately gotten more complex per new DOE requirements." It can take a long time to go through the process. SLAC has not submitted any MoUs in the last 5 years. Les is still pushing forward and sent an outline to his bosses. This is not looking hopeful.
UUM (Updated 5/3/2018)
Regarding the Regarding 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 as shown in the attached screenshot.
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 governmentsitesmedia and government sites. There is no update 3/29/2018.
NUST: (Updated 5/3/8/2018))
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 , 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.
UAF/GHZU (
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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).
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 joined the team comparing icmp/ping vs TCP for both IPv4 and IPv6, Umar has sent instructions.
PingER at SLAC
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.
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.
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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
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.
- Want MAs at:
- See Towards Analysis of ICMP vs TCP Ping Latencies
- Want MAs at:Umar is concentrating on understanding why there are some significant differences. He will look at the impact of the stacks (by setting up a control environment wit the latest Linux tools, and see if the difference in the stack traversals times is significant when compared to the overall RTT differences. He is also thinking of seeing if there are common elements (e.g. hops) that can be tied to significant differences in RTT time.
- SLAC and Virginia tech (Les, Umar) measurements for ping vs nping completed,
- China (Saqib has agreed to join in),
- Thailand (Charnsak has agreed to join in),
- If others wish to join the paper (i.e. make the measurements - takes just over a week elapsed time, help analyze the data and put together the paper), we need to know soon.
- Pakistan (Wajahat)?
- Malaysia-Sarawak (Johari)?
- Malaysia mainland (Adib)?
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| Host | State | last seen | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pinger-ncp.ncp.edu.pk | pinger-ncp.ncp.edu.pk down | Nov 29, 2018 | ||
| 121.56.146.180 (pinger.kohat.edu.pk) | Down | Nov 22nd, 2018 | ||
| pinger. | daffiodilvarsitydaffodilvarsity.edu.bd | Does not ping, name resolves, web site not accessible, sent email 4/29/2018, they did something and all is working again | April 21st 2018 | Fixed |
| pinger2.if.ufrj.br | Flaky, down since 4/28/2018, and out of disk space, pinger.xml truncated, emaile, sent email 4/28/2017, they are looking at it | April 4/28/2018 | ||
| pingeramity.in | It was working, now working on reliability | April 27, 2018 |
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Next meeting: Thursday, June 7th 9pm Pacific time; Friday, June 10th8th, 2018 9:00am Pakistan time; 12:00noon Malaysian & Guangzhou time; and 11am Thailand time.
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