Attendees
Nara, Tan, Imran and the UNIMAS Prof Khairuddin VC at Unimas and Les in the Bay Area. Bebo was unable to be present.
General
We resceduled rescheduled this meeting to 27th 26th July (instead of 20th 19th July) Pacific time. The main reason for this is because since the UNIMAS Vice Chancellor, Prof Khairuddin would like to join the session and is only available on 27th July . It will be (Sarawak time). The meeting was by Skype at 11am in Sarawak as usual. We started the meeting using video so the VC and Les could visually introduce themselves.
The VC had mentioned that they can schedule a visit by the UNIMAS top management to Stanford sometime late this year or early next year, to establish a formalised linkage. Apart from that Nara suggests that UNIMAS will seek an internal grant for local travels to ePinger sites such as Bario.
Also, it would be useful to identify international conferences held around California where UNIMAS can submit a joint paper to. This could allow UNIMAS research team members to travel.
Discussions with VC
Unimas will invite Les to visit Unimas for the order of a week or more to coincide with the Unimas 20 year anniversary celebrations on December 12th, 2012. This will enable meeting with the VC, staff and students, looking at facilities, fleshing out how the program should go forward, possibly giving talks on PingER, network monitoring etc. Unimas will send Les a formal letter of invitation to aid with visa etc.
Unimas plan to have a workshop on Pinger when Les come in December. Unimas will invite participants from universities in West Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, (Brunei and Kalimantan could be added). The idea is to establish regional agreement for types of studies that can be undertaken, the sharing of data and exploration of future projects.
In the meantime it would help if Les could put together more detail on what the Unimas student or staff would be engaged in at SLAC etc.
Unimas are going to propose a project to install ePingER hosts in remote Sarawak communities such as Bario in the Kelabit highlands. Initially these would simply be PingER targets responding to pings. Later depending on bandwidth availabilty etc. they could also be turned into PingER monitoring hosts and a web site.
To assist in authorizing visits to SLAC Les will investigate whether there are conferences, meetings etc in the US that could be part of the trip. There is an Internet2 / ESnet Joint Techs meeting from the 13th-17th January 2013 in Hawaii. The focal areas are: Network Research and Emerging Technologies; Network Architecture and Operations; R&E Network Applications. there are also usually session on non US networks, for example at the last meeting at Stanford there was a talk on Challenges of Building an Affordable and Scalable Wireless Network at Universities in West Africa & KENET: Where we are , see http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012summer/20120718-Wanja-Njue.pdf and http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/jt2012summer/20120718-Togo-challenges%20building%20wifi%20networks.pdf. Les does not currently know of a particular relevant other conference/meeting especially one on the West Coast of the US or even better in the Bay Area.
The government of Sarawak is embarking on a huge project on renewable energy. This is a big issue in Sarawak partially due to the isolation of many places. They have lots pf water so hydro-electric power is very interesting. They are interested what SLAC or Stanford are doing in this area. This is not an area Les is directly associated with, Being funded by the US Department of Energy (DoE) SLAC is interested in Energy. There is basic research focused on how catalysts work, how does sunlight work in plants to sequester carbon and produce energy, looking at the challenge to transform our future energy supplies from fossil fuels to renewable energy while still enabling economic growth see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/reports19/slac-r-993.pdf. There is also work on the Stanford campus and DoE sites see for example http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/energyss/2010//Speakers.asp. Also we strive to expand the use of renewable energy within our facility and our activities by implementing renewable energy projects and by purchasing electricity from renewable energy sources.
The VC also expressed interest in setting up a meeting with the SLAC Director Persis Drell to share ideas. Les will follow up on this.
UNIMAS PingER host name
Currently UNIMAS (Imran) moving Imran has successfully assigned the DNS name pinger.unimas.my to the UNIMAS PingER monitor (49.50.236.98) so it has a registered DNS name pinger.unimas.my. When done, . Les has tested the ping and traceroute servers and the ping_data server and all work correctly. Les will update the meta data for this host in the PingER database (NODEDETAILS) and let Imran know so Imran can change the <SrcName> in pinger.xml at Unimas.
Extending UNIMAS PingER hosts monitoring
Are there thoughts on Cocerning extending the PingER monitor at UNIMAS to add remote hosts in Malaysia to the list of hosts monitored ? Johari has just joined the team and will be identifying hosts to ping in Malaysia, and then add them to pinger.xml. For how to add hosts to pinger.xml see: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/faq.html#extra.
They have remote sites in Kelabit Highlands in Barrio. There is a wireless network. the hosts are solar powered. They could be pinged install an ePinger host and ping from Unimas via the VSAT connection. Could be a month or two to set the host at Barrio Bario up. There are other telecenter sites that are similar. They could also put up hosts in these places. These telecenters include: Long Lamai, and Ba Kalalan.
It would also be interesting to extend the monitoring to other more centrally connected hosts in the cities of Malaysia. What about Mimos in West Malaysia (KL) or at Kota Kinabalu (University Malaysia Sabah), Swinburne in Kuching, Miri, Manipal university in KL.
The monitoring would will provide an historical record of performance (round trip times, jitter, loss), reachability etc. Based on this a case study could be put together to identify problems in particular the reliability (e.g. MTBF, uptime, MTTF), how congested the connection is, identify problems and possibly identify the causes.
When a reasonable amount of data has been gathered then a case study could be be made of the connections to the remote sites, to identify and compare the performance.They will work on identifying hosts to ping in Malaysia, and then add them to pinger.xml. Imran will test out the HostList in pinger.xml at his house.
Imran Had problems testing the pinger measurement agent Imran will test out the HostList in pinger.xml at his house. Private IP address maybe a problems the problem since they use NATs at Barrio and probably at Imran's home.
By the next meeting they plan to have made a lot of progress on extending pinger.xml to add a dozen or more hosts in Malaysia,.
ePingER
See https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/ePingER+Project
...
An ePingER App for an Android or iOS might also be an interesting project.
Next meeting
Thursday 23rd August 8pm Pacific Daylight Time, Friday 24th August 11am.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Funding for visits and students
...
From previous notes:
Students have a local superviser in Kuching. We start with a couple of graduate students interested in network monitoring.
...
They are funded by Kuching
If interested then fairly early on it would be good to have a face to face meeting in Kuching and/or SLAC to go over expectations, do some publicity, introductions etc.
- A next step is to further engage the UNIMAS vice chancellor. Nara has already talked with the VC, The VC was unable to make this Skype meeting, but we will need to set one up for him to meet with the SLAC end. this would be a good time to discuss resources etc.
- Les has sent some ideas for projects/tasks. A first cut is available.
Next meeting
...
- .
Future
Are there resources and what for:
...
- Computing requirements, accounts at SLAC
- Interim email lists and SMS txt messages
- Documentation respository (probably use the SLAC wiki)
- Follow on meetings would include identified students, progress reports etc.
Useful links
...