Page History

...

•  + Responded via Doodle can attend; - Responded, but unable to attend on this date; ? extra email sent asking if attending 
• Email addresses (all the following are in pinger-my).The link for the Doodle poll is https://doodle.com/poll/9wc4hxwakqk74wkh
  • cottrell@slac.stanford.edu; wajahat.hussain@seecs.edu.pk; saqibutm@outlook.com; bebo@slac.stanford.edu; umar.kalim@gmail.com; kliaqat.msee17seecs@seecs.edu.pk; johari.abdullah@gmail.com; adibhabbal@karabuk.edu.tr; charnsak.s@ubru.ac.th; eyadayoubi@gmail.com; b.muslmani@yahoo.com; shadi.jawarneh@yahoo.com; xsaifahmadx@gmail.com

Wajahat is recovering from numerous infections, starting to visit office once again (has recovered and was back at the office  2/17/2020).

Actual Attendees

Umar, Bebo, Kiran.

Use of Zoom

Amity 

Amity team photo:

Image Removed

Amity 

Amity team photo:

Image Added

Saqib plans to continue work on PingER monitoring for remote areas, in particular in Pakistan. He will use Android PingERs. This may partially tie into the Amity project.

He will also continue his work on Blockchain and plans to attend a Blockchain workshop in Guangzhou.

The 4th  Call for Proposals for The Asi@Connect Project:

• Saqib submitted a concept note in WP6 with Wajahat and Les as co-applicant.
• It was accepted and Saqib was given the go-ahead to submit a Full Proposal.
• With suggestions and an endorsement letter from PERN plus CVs from Wajahat and Les, Saqib put together a full proposal and it was submitted 11/6/2019.
• However, it was not accepted

Saqib plans to get 2-3 undergraduate students in a month or so and plans to look at Android PingER.

He has been invited to an APAN meeting in Nepal, however, with the Corona Virus it was postponed.

Saqib registered a DNS name for GC Women University Faisalabad. The new URL is http://pinger.gcwuf.edu.pk/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl. Previously there was no DNS name so the name was reported as 121.52.153.227. This required a change in the <SrcName> in pinger.xml and exposed a bug in ping_data.pl which has been fixed in the latest release (4.6).

SLAC

• Les turned on the debugging to investigate the discovery that several analysis scripts had stopped working in November 2019
  
  • Each night we run about 100 analysis scripts as batch jobs and after fixing problems with the mon-lib.pl etc. we still found about 10% were randomly failing.
  • After about 4 weeks it eventually transpired that some of the batch machines had not been enabled to access the Oracle database via the firewall. The jobs submitted to those hosts failed.
  • The cause of the problem was eventually identified about January 3rd and fixed about January 6th. No data was lost.
• The new version of Linux CentOS7, does not appear to support the following modules that are used by the PingER analysis.
  
  • The Oracle database interface. PingER uses Oracle so there could be a problem. 
    
  • The perl statistics module
  • I will restrict the PingER analysis jobs to the earlier version of Linux (RHEL6) to avoid these problems. I am working with the systems folks at SLAC and looking into when the current version of Linux at SLAC (RHEL6) will no longer be supported and following SLAC's planning on how or whether to address the issues.
    • Rhel6 has full support until Nov 30, 2020. It then goes on "extended" support until June 2024. I expect SLAC will continue to use it during the extended support phase, at least for a couple of years.
    • Umar did some research and found:
      • I did a cursory search and it appears that in addition to having the Oracle database server, we would also need the items listed at the bottom. 
        If I were to test, I'd consider setting up a VirtualBox VM on my laptop and install CentOS7, Oracle database, instant client, Perl, and Perl driver for Oracle and test in the VM. I also searched to see if I could find some reference of "Oracle driver not available for CentOS7", but I couldn't find any. 
        I would recommend testing in an isolated VM so that we don't break the existing setup.
        1) Oracle instant client
        https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html
        2) Oracle DBD - last updated in 7/2019
        https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD::Oracle
        https://metacpan.org/source/MJEVANS/DBD-Oracle-1.80/README
        Here is a good breakdown that explains the relevant pieces (ignore the references to MySQL here). With testing we'll be sure what works and what doesn't.
        https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1958069/what-is-the-difference-between-dbi-and-dbd
        May be I am missing something, but I do not understand why there won't be a perl driver for Oracle on CentOS7.

Umar 

State of MAs.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  There will be a Doodle poll, for  2020 at 9 pm Pacific time; a day later 9:00 am Pakistan time; 9:30 am India time; 12:00 pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time;  1:00 pm Thailand time; 6:00 am Jordan time. 5:00am Turkey time.  

...

Saqib plans to continue work on PingER monitoring for remote areas, in particular in Pakistan. He will use Android PingERs. This may partially tie into the Amity project.

He will also continue his work on Blockchain and plans to attend a Blockchain workshop in Guangzhou.

Saqib plans to get 2-3 undergraduate students in a month or so and plans to look at Android PingER. No update 4/16/2020.

/afs/slac.stanford.edu/package/pinger/prm/prm.pl -lp true -c /afs/slac.stanford.edu/package/pinger/prm/prm-last120days-slac.conf 

UMAR

SLAC

• Bebo posed the question of whether PingER can identify changes in Internet responsiveness as measured by PingER as a result of the impact of the Covid-19 virus.
• The first attempts looking et PingER statistics and see if there were any noticeable changes in performance attributable to Covid-19 interventions (e.g. shutting down schools,  social distancing, gathering cancellations, lockdowns), were not very successful (see PingER and COVID-19). See https://covid19-interventions.com/ for interventions in European, and some Asian countries.
• Another attempt to correlate the impacts might be to use a tool such as Google Motion Charts to look for correlations between say Covid-19 cases (cases, hospital admissions, deaths etc) and PingER metrics as a function of time, by country, continent, plus population or density of population. The idea is that as Covid-19 cases pass say 100, the country will impose interventions such as school closing,  social distancing etc. which will change the usage patterns of the Internet which may have noticeable impacts on the PingER measurements.
• Unfortunately Google Motion metrics relies on Flash and is no longer supported .
  • A possible alternative is Charta.ca
  • I have therefore put together a Perl script (chart-covid.pl) to take daily PingER metrics for the last 120 days together with up-to-date raw data on the coronavirus from the Johns HopkinsUniversity GitHub site: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19, for various countries with their population, area, population density and cast the data in a format suitable for Charta.ca.
  • There is a web page I put together on how to use Charta.ca at Using Chart.ca.
  • There is an example at https://charteca.blob.core.windows.net/pubs/3Z3qcBXqCT9B3WHz
  • Instead of using Covid-19 confirmed cases, it might be good to use the Unacast cell phone location data to get a measure of how people are social distancing. I have sent them two emails but no response.
    
• Discussion:
  • The major Russian network Rostelcom, high jacked traffic around April 5, 2020 see https://www.zdnet.com/article/russian-telco-hijacks-internet-traffic-for-google-aws-cloudflare-and-others/. This may have had some impact on PingER metrics.
    
  • Les pointed out that many of our targets (and of course the SLAC Measurement Agent) for the US (ESnet and Internet2), Europe (Dante, and national education/research networks etc.), Australia (AARNET) and parts of Asia (TEIN) are on well-provisioned, lightly loaded networks so it is the transit networks are not expected to see big changes.
  • Umar pointed out that the closing of schools, people staying at home should increase the traffic (e.g. between students and profs teaching remotely, people surfing the web watching videos etc) on CDNs (Content Deliverable Networks), and much of this traffic is on public networks. Thus one might see big changes for traffic transitting public networks. 
  • Since PingER is not monitoring homes and content deliverers, PingER would not expect to see big changes in responsiveness for most of our targets in the above regions.
  • On the other hand, African networks are less well developed and PingER may see more of an effect for such targets.

State of MAs.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  There will be a Doodle poll, for  2020 at 9 pm Pacific time; a day later 9:00 am Pakistan time; 9:30 am India time; 12:00 pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time;  1:00 pm Thailand time; 6:00 am Jordan time. 5:00am Turkey time.  

...

Old information

NUST moved here 4/14/2020

Pv6 host at NUST:

Wajahat has requested Hasan to install PingER on an IPv6 host at NUST, Saqib has contacted Hasan to tell him where to find and upload the code. There is not a host name for the MA yet. Hopefully, this will be available by next month's meeting.

•  7/24/2019 Les emailed Wajahat with a request for an update.
• At the meeting Wajahat had asked the student to contact Saqib and get the information on energizing IPv6. Saqib provided the information, but the student could not access the URL (apparently the URLwas down). Wajahat was on leave and when he returned the internship had expired, so Wajahat is unsure what happened. Wajahat will start a new student next week and will set him on the IPv6 project. Progress? 

Sent email on 2/4/2020 to Kiran at NUST on how to bring the vu host's pinger.xml up to date. As of 2/3/2020 pinger.xml at vu now looks good and we now appear to be able to gather good data.

SLAC moved here 4/13/2020.

The new version of Linux CentOS7, does not appear to support the following modules that are used by the PingER analysis.

• The Oracle database interface. PingER uses Oracle so there could be a problem. 
  
• The perl statistics module
• I will restrict the PingER analysis jobs to the earlier version of Linux (RHEL6) to avoid these problems. I am working with the systems folks at SLAC and looking into when the current version of Linux at SLAC (RHEL6) will no longer be supported and following SLAC's planning on how or whether to address the issues.
  • Rhel6 has full support until Nov 30, 2020. It then goes on "extended" support until June 2024. I expect SLAC will continue to use it during the extended support phase, at least for a couple of years.
  • Umar did some research and found:
    • I did a cursory search and it appears that in addition to having the Oracle database server, we would also need the items listed at the bottom. 
      If I were to test, I'd consider setting up a VirtualBox VM on my laptop and install CentOS7, Oracle database, instant client, Perl, and Perl driver for Oracle and test in the VM. I also searched to see if I could find some reference of "Oracle driver not available for CentOS7", but I couldn't find any. 
      I would recommend testing in an isolated VM so that we don't break the existing setup.
      1) Oracle instant client
      https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html
      2) Oracle DBD - last updated in 7/2019
      https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD::Oracle
      https://metacpan.org/source/MJEVANS/DBD-Oracle-1.80/README
      Here is a good breakdown that explains the relevant pieces (ignore the references to MySQL here). With testing we'll be sure what works and what doesn't.
      https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1958069/what-is-the-difference-between-dbi-and-dbd
      May be I am missing something, but I do not understand why there won't be a perl driver for Oracle on CentOS7.

Umar moved here 1/10/2020

...