Page History

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Anjum, Hassaan Khaliq, Kashif+, Raja+,  Johari-, Nara, Adnan+, Abdullah, Badrul, Ridzuan+, Ibrahim+, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib, Les+, Renan, Bebo+

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- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

Actual attendees:

Anjum, Kashif, Raja, Adnan, Ibrahim, Saqib, Les, Bebo

Administration

• Anjum reports (6/23/2014) that "the proposal for conference has been submitted for approval and Pinger has been added in the agenda. Travel expenses for Les and Bebo have also been included in the conference proposal. We are awaiting the proposal approval. If the proposal gets approved, we can then decide on wether to actually conduct the Pinger Workshop at UM or at another place. I am saying this because I believe a stand alone pinger workshop will be more preferable." It has been approved by the dean, next it goes to the chancellor. Hope to have decision in a couple of weeks. Once the approval is given the venue for the conference can be at UM or UUM.Prof. Abdullah Gani says we shall get the approval soon (7/16/2014). Once the approval is given the venue for the conference can be at UM or UUM.
  
  As discussed earlier, the only twist here is that Pinger will be seen as a case study for big data. This is good in a sense that people interested in doing research in the domain of big data can deploy pinger monitoring nodes at their respective universities/organizations and in return, play around with the data. We agreed that it looked like the 25th would be a good day for the PingER workshop. Les should be able to make it from Burkina Faso, and Bebo should be able to get back to the US for Thanksgiving.  There would be back to back presentation on how PingER gathers, archives data, what data there is, the data types, how to access etc.  by Les followed by Bebo on Google Tools for Big data.

• Anjum suggested putting together a paper on metrics provided by PingER for Sigmetrix. The due date is in November.

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Ibrahim Abaker  is planning to work on a topic initially entitled " leveraging pingER big data with a modified pingtable for event-correlation and clustering".  Ibrahim has a proposal, see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17162/leveraging+pingER+big+data+with+a+modified+pingtable+for+event-correlation+and+clustering.docx. Ibrahim reports "I 7/15/2014 "I have spent the last few months trying to understand the concept of big data storage and its retrieval as well as the traditional approach of storing RDF data. I have integrated a single hadoop cluster in our cloud. but for this project we need multiple clusters, which i I have already discussed with Dr. Badrul and he will provide me with big storage for the experiment."

"I have come up with initial proposed solution model. This model consists of several parts. The upper parts of the Figure below shows the data source, in which PingER data will be convert into RDF format. Then the data pre-processor will take care of converting RDF/XML into N-triples serialization formats using N-triples convertor module. This N-triple file of an RDF graph will be as an input and stores the triples in storage as a key value pair using MapReduce jobs"

Image Added

Les fowarded by email the information from Ibrahim to Renan following the meeting

UNIMAS

Johari will try Johari is unable to attend this skype meeting but at the same time bring . Dr. Adnan Shahid Khan who recently joined UNIMAS, to the meeting as well. Adnan  will represent UNIMAS.  Adnan is coming up to speed. He has been added to http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php and Adib has been requested to add him to pinger-myAdnan is on the pinger-my email list as of April 25, 2014. Adnan met yesterday with Johari. 

Johari says there is no progress on the following, the student may take up some of these issues after Ramadan:

The Raspberry Pi is at the data centre and has a public IP address. It was working last week, until the UPS failed over the weekend. It did not reboot itself. Johari will look at the problem. 

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Johari has a research student who finalized a proposal in order to officially apply for his masters.  He will start in February. He is currently working on threshold/anomaly detection, and will extend to correlating performance over multiple routes. He will share the proposal with Les and others April. No progress 6/4/2014.

UTM 

No updates regarding traceroute problem at UTM. However, Saqib thinks the problem is still in CICT firewall or router as tcp traceroute command works fine from UTM.

Saqib met with MYREN who have made many topology changes. Saqib will also incorporate these into the Malaysian case study. He is seeing anomalously long delays between mainland Malaysia and Sarawak. It does not appear to be due to congestion. We need to understand the routing and which undersea cables are being used. Saqib will send more details after the meeting. He will also contact MYREN.

Saqib has talked to MYREN they say the routers at hops 5 and 6 in the traceroute from UM to UNIMAS are both at UM and the long delay between them is due to congestion. I am skeptical since hops 6-12 have similar RTT and 12 is near Kuching. I suggest Saqib run mtr for a day or more from UM to UNIMAS see if there is any day night variation in RTT. If min RTT gets down to <2 ms, then the MYREN guy is right. If it is ~ 50ms  and persists for several days then it really does not look like congestion (which should vary day night as the number of users changes). In that case then it really appears hop 6 is physically close to hop 12 since they have the same min RTT. Taken together with the email from UM I would be very suspicious of the MYREN statement.

Saqib met with MYREN who have made many topology changes. Saqib will also incorporate these into the Malaysian case study. He is seeing anomalously long delays between mainland Malaysia and Sarawak. It does not appear to be due to congestion. We need to understand the routing and which undersea cables are being used. Saqib will send more details after the meeting. He will also contact MYREN.

Saqib's proposal is almost ready however we do not see somewhere (funding agency) to submit it to. The next Saqib's proposal is almost ready however we do not see somewhere (funding agency) to submit it to. The next round of the FRGS may be the next opportunity

UUM

. Anjum and Saqib will discuss where best to fit Saqib's proposal and Anjum will help edit the proposal.

UUM

Regarding the monitoring host Regarding the monitoring host in UUM, Adib has assigned one student to prepare the configuration/installation plan including how to secure their host from attack. He has a public IP address.  He needs to the DNS registration by Sunday 25th May or Monday.  He is in the last stage of working with the Computer Center. Adib requested Johari to share  the UNIMAS setting so it is easier for the student to follow. No update 6/5/2014, 6/25/2014. 

UUM pinger is almost ready. Adib has got an public IP address together with a dns name. Once this is settled the tracreoute.pl will follow. This  will increase  the number of  landmarks in mainland Malaysia by 50% and improve geolocation. Adib plans to get to this next week when he returns from vacation.

NUST

The Bahawalpur site for new PingER Monitoring node: Kashif contacted once again the Director IT, and this time he replied positively and he is waiting for the new machine and hopefully the installation of PingER node will be done in next week.

Kashif reports the following are now fixed.

Installation is in progress for the Bahawalpur site. Install complete needs aproval from head, hopefully up on Monday

The following are now up and running:

• sau

  airuniversity

  .seecs.edu.pk

  , Solved, UP and Running.

• pingerkhi-uok.pern

  pinger.nca

  .edu.pk

• buitms.seecs.edu.pk

The latter two report a problem with accessing the httpd file. However, this does not interfere with their correct working.  The issue is quite strange. For some reason apache can't access the /etc/httpd/ directory when ping_data.pl is called from the web but from the terminal it works just fine (both as root and apache).

There are also several sites that seem to have power problems and are often not available at the normal early morning (Pacific time) gathering time. We have added extra gathering times for a couple of sites.

Kashif is working on the rest of nodes. 

• duhs.seecs.edu.pk, Kashif recommends to drop they do not seem interested. This has been done.
• pinger.kohat.edu.pk, System issue, we are sending new motherboard in this week. 
• pingerkhi-uok.pern.edu.pk, SFP Connector Problem, We are sending new one in this week.  
• sau.seecs.edu.pk, System Issue, New system is ready and will send in this week.
• uaf.seecs.edu.pk,  Drop (IP blocked frequently so currently not good as a PingER). Anjum recommended that if we do not have another host in faislabad then this host may be very important.  Since Kashif is from Faisalabad, Anjum suggested we try a bit more if there is no other host. Looking at the map (see http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/wan-mon/viper/pinger-coverage-gmap.html), it appears PK.PERNFSBDPOP.EDU.N1 is nearby. Thus UAF has been dropped.

Raja

• , Solved, UP and Running.

There are also several sites that seem to have power problems and are often not available at the normal early morning (Pacific time) gathering time, in particular buitms.seecs.edu.pk and www.upesh.edu.pk which can be down for days at a time. I do have a script that will ping the site at regular intervals and when/if it finally responds then try and gather the data. However we do not have a satisfactory solution to gathering data from these sites. Buitms is an electrical problem thta they hope to solve in a month. Upesh only pings within the country, this not understood at the moment.

The following sites have been dropped. 

• duhs.seecs.edu.pk, Dropped

• uaf.seecs.edu.pk,  Dropped

Kashif is working on:

• pinger.kohat.edu.pk, Still, trying to find motherboard of Dell Optiplex 760. System, is old, hard to find motherboard, hope to solve soon.

Raja

Raja has added an optional feature to exclude water areas from the acceptable area. This reduces the error (proportional to area), but sometimes leads to a less accurate centroid (for the US sites, only 11 had water, the centroid of 5 showed improvement, 6 got worse). Currently it is only available for N. America. Here is a confluence page showing few examples: TULIP AIG with water exclusion

The number of working, usable landmarks is now up to 340. 

Replaced non responding Beacon with working hosts. The table below shows the changes made:

Jordon monitor was down since 12th June. Has been fixed after emailing the contact.

Raja leaves SLAC early August to return to Pakistan.Raja has added an optional feature to exclude water areas from the acceptable area. This reduces the error (proportional to area), but sometimes leads to a less accurate centroid. Currently it is only available for N. America. He will update the documentation with examples. The number of working, usable landmarks is now up to 340. 

PingER at SLAC

Les requested an update from Yahoo about TULIP's geolocation. They answered "We are very much interested in getting IP triangulation at internet scale, we will have internal sync-up on how we can leverage this initiative if there is rate limit and get back. Regarding opening up yahoo sites for deploying ping server requires some more time to discuss this with relevant stake holders with in yahoo." No word, sent a reminder 5/19/2014. No response 6/4/2014, 6/25/2014.. 

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Anjum suggested Saqib,  Badrul and Johari put together a paper on user experiences with using the Internet in Malaysia as seen from Malaysian universities. In particular round trip time, losses, jitter, reliability, routing/peering, in particular anomalies, and the impact on VoIP, throughput etc.  It would be good to engage someone from MYREN.

Potential projects

See list of Projects

Future meeting  - Les

Next meeting Wednesday July 16th August 20th  2014 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday July 17th August 21st 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday July 17thAugust 21st, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday July 17thAugust 21st, 2014 01:00am Rio Standard Time.

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