Page History

 Time & date 

Next This meeting:  Tuesday December 11th at 8 10 pm Pacific time ; Wednesday December 12th, 2018 92018 11:00 am Pakistan time; 911:30 am India time; 122:00 noon pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time; and 11 am  1:00pm Thailand time; 6 6:00am Jordan 00 am Jordan time (I think)

Format

New items and updates are in boldface.

...

• Need to add Umar and Dr. Taha - Johari

Attendees

Invitees:

Wajahat Hussain-, Taha (SEECS), Saqib+ (GZHU); Johari (UNIMAS);  Adib (UUM); Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul- (Ubru), Les+, Bebo+, Umar+

• + Responded via Doodle will attend; - Responded via Doodle but unable to attend on this date; Dr Shadi Aljawarneh unable to attend this week 

Actual Attendees

Umar, Saqib, Bebo, Les

Others

...

Administration

• Membership of pinger-my is in https://groups.google.com.
• Bebo pointed out that the International Web Conference will be in San Francisco in 2019 (see http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=77195&copyownerid=85335).  There are a whole range of topics. He would love to see something submitted related to PingER.
  • Maybe something on Android PingER and potential uses.
• Bebo, possible interest in an MA in Jordan - 10/9/2018.
  • It is a university of Science and Technology.
  • Bebo is looking to send the Home page: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/, plus  Remote Host site invitation letter template, Monitor Host site invitation letter template:(txt, doc), form to register a host to the contact. 
  • Dr. Shadi Aljawarneh <shadi.jawarneh@yahoo.com> skype ID shadi Jawarneh is unable to attend this meeting.
  • I have invited Shadi to join the pinger-my email list.  It timed out with no response.
This meeting was scheduled with the aid of Doodle poll. It will be via Zoom, Umar is arranging.  Attendees will need the Zoom APP available at: https://zoom.us/download#client_4meeting

Use of Zoom

...

Jordan (last update 11/19/2018)

• We discussed the many uses of PingER data including:
  • the impact on network performance of events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, civil uprisings, the world cup, 
  • exploring the data semantically e.g. byLinked Open Data
  • Correlations with other indices such as economics, human development.
• We also discussed:
  •  development of new low cost, low power PingER Measurement Agents (MA) utilizing Android devices.
  • the possibilities of developing/utilizing a decentralized logging/analysis/presentation structure using BlockChain. This would reduce the dependence on SLAC.

Umar sent Shadi two URLs on how to download and install the MA software and possible interests for students.

Les followed up with email 12/6/2018.

Action Items from previous meeting

• Figuring out how to move forward with the Android PingER project, in particular, scheduling a Skype meeting awaits Amity. Email reminder to Amity 12/6/2018.
• Wajahat: will provide a list of working or potentially working (e.g. being worked on) Pakistani MAs to Les. They are working on nodes as of email 10/6/2018.
• Johari: enter Umar and Dr. Taha into http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php, Les sent reminder email 10/3/2018. No progress 11/16/2018

Amity (Updated 8/6/2018, No update 9/6/2018)

• Amity MA is unreliable so using it for a case study does not appear fruitful. Les is working with Amity to try and understand this unreliability (emails to Amity  10/6/2018, 12/6/2018), they say "There is an internet problem we are taking care of it and will get back soon".  Meeting planned soon (email reminder sent 12//6/2018)

Thailand (No update 8/9/2018, No update 9/6/2018, No update 11/19/2018)

Charnsak is looking at a host in Champasak University, Chan Parsa province in Laos as a potential site for a PingER MA. Charnsak just got approved to make contact with the Champasak University. He expects to set up the MA in the next 4-5 months (say towards end 2018). It also depends on the partner university, and there may be a lot of paperwork.

Email requesting update sent 12/6/2018.

UNIMAS (No update 8/9/2018, no update 9/6/2018, no update 10/7/2018, no update 11/19/2018)

Need to add Umar Kalim to http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php. From the 7/5/2018 meeting: Johari can't ssh into the server so he will go to it on Monday.  He will also upload the new UNIMAS PingER website next week.

Sent reminder emails 8/6/2018. 9/3/2018.

UUM (No update 8/9/2018, No update 9/6/2018, 11/19/2018)

Les has sent Adib updates to Figs 3, 4, 5 to extend out to 2018. This is for the paper  Socio-economic Development Indices and Their Reflection on Internet Performance in ASEAN Countries

Adib will submit the paper to World Development: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/world-development

NUST: (No update 11/19/2018)

Les sent email to Wajahat 12/6/2018 requesting update to the following:

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. 

• This meeting was scheduled with the aid of a Doodle poll. 
  • It was by Zoom
    

Use of Zoom

The use of Zoom was very successful, the instructions (above) were clear, we could hear each other clearly, we had large postage stamps showing video of each person, Les shared his screen showing the meeting notes, we successfully experimented with the leader muting others, we were able to also use a text chat feature.  We will use this in the future instead of  Skype.  In particular, we have a scheduled meeting with the Jordan team at 8:00 pm  12/12/2018. Currently, there will be a different URL for each meeting of the form https://stanford.zoom.us/j/185360638 where the 185360538 will vary from meeting to meeting.

Action Items from previous meeting

• Figuring out how to move forward with the Android PingER project, in particular, scheduling a Skype meeting awaits Amity. Email reminder to Amity 12/6/2018. No response.
• Wajahat: will provide a list of working or potentially working (e.g. being worked on) Pakistani MAs to Les. They are working on nodes as of email 10/6/2018.
• Johari: enter Umar and Dr. Taha into http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php, Les sent reminder email 10/3/2018. No progress 11/16/2018

Jordan (last update 11/19/2018)

Bebo, possible interest in an MA in Jordan - 10/9/2018. It is a university of Science and Technology.

• Bebo sent the Home page: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/, plus  Remote Host site invitation letter template, Monitor Host site invitation letter template:(txt, doc), form to register a host to the contact.  
• Dr Shadi Aljawarneh (<shadi.jawarneh@yahoo.com> skype ID shadi Jawarneh) is unable to attend this week. He has been out of the country, since a week for a program collaboration in India and is busy during next days in this program. It is possible that his students are working on installing the PingER MA. If possible, one of his students could join the upcoming meetings. We sent an invite, received a reply and have scheduled a Zoom meeting  8:00pm 12/12/2018 PST.  A reminder was sent by Umar to the Jordan team requesting confirmation.

• At the previous meeting we discussed the many uses of PingER data including:
  • the impact on network performance of events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, civil uprisings, the world cup, 
  • exploring the data semantically e.g. byLinked Open Data
  • Correlations with other indices such as economics, human development.
• We also discussed:
  •  development of new low cost, low power PingER Measurement Agents (MA) utilizing Android devices.
  • the possibilities of developing/utilizing a decentralized logging/analysis/presentation structure using BlockChain. This would reduce the dependence on SLAC.

Amity (Updated 8/6/2018, No update 9/6/2018)

• Amity MA is unreliable so using it for a case study does not appear fruitful. Les is working with Amity to try and understand this unreliability (emails to Amity  10/6/2018, 12/6/2018), they say "There is an internet problem we are taking care of it and will get back soon".  Meeting planned soon (email reminder sent 12//6/2018), no response.

Thailand (No update 8/9/2018, No update 9/6/2018, No update 11/19/2018)

Charnsak is looking at a host in Champasak University, Chan Parsa province in Laos as a potential site for a PingER MA. Charnsak just got approved to make contact with the Champasak University. He expects to set up the MA in the next 4-5 months (say towards end 2018). It also depends on the partner university, and there may be a lot of paperwork.

Email requesting update sent 12/6/2018.

UNIMAS (No update 8/9/2018, no update 9/6/2018, no update 10/7/2018, no update 11/19/2018, 12/11/2018)

Need to add Umar Kalim to http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php. From the 7/5/2018 meeting: Johari can't ssh into the server so he will go to it on Monday.  He will also upload the new UNIMAS PingER website next week.

Sent reminder emails 8/6/2018. 9/3/2018.

UUM (No update 8/9/2018, No update 9/6/2018, 11/19/2018, 12/11/2018))

Les has sent Adib updates to Figs 3, 4, 5 to extend out to 2018. This is for the paper  Socio-economic Development Indices and Their Reflection on Internet Performance in ASEAN Countries

Adib will submit the paper to World Development: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/world-development

NUST:

• Saqib's future at GZHU will be much clearer after November, current contract expires February 2019. Saqib reports that things are still unsure, his current contract cannot be renewed.
• Gathering data is no longer working. Saqib tried to make the Beijing MA live again. However, he has little control over it as it is in the CERNET cloud. The traceroute server still works. We have given up on the MA. It has been Disabled.

PingER at SLAC  

PingER IPV6 support

• Les disabled the GZHU Beijing MA.
• There was a discussion on GDPR and possible implications for PingER. The PingER-my email list is a Google email list, we believe people can remove themselves. There may be some other implications however, we are not aware of them.

Context:

• Is there any statistical difference between ICMP and TCP Ping? The context here is the Internet (not data center). This is important because the network stack is different (e.g., MPI over infiniband) and latencies are significantly less.

Questions:

• Why should we focus on minimum RTT instead of average RTT
  • Min RTT essentially reflects fixed delay, while average RTT subsumes variations and path load
  • Link to raw results with minRTT results:
    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZPgljFCDFcsVUxEFA6NYMjhayoqYtMYi
• Are the R plots generated using minRTT?
  • Averages and computed. Min RTT is available. Scripts need to be updated to use minRTT.
• What is the breakdown of latency between endpoints? If there is a difference, is it because of the type or location of the source? What if the source of traffic was not SLAC? Is there a correlation with the distance between the endpoints?
  • Latency for an echo packet to travel up the stack and back down is about 3.75 micro seconds (see StackMap https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/yasukata). As expected, this is negligible when considered with milli second latencies.The remaining components would be propagation and queuing delay. As we can not breakdown the two in a public network without using an active look like
    • To replicate use system tap. See: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/419449/how-can-i-determine-if-a-latency-is-due-to-a-driver-or-the-scheduler
  • pathchirp etc, we'll continue to consider these as a single component.
• Are the differences limited to a particular region? How do we determine/understand if traffic prioritization is implemented?Test in a controlled environment to avoid variables such as traffic prioritization, queuing delay due to cross traffic. Review the time series of latencies for both ICMP and TCP ping, instead of averages?
  • It may be that end hosts which are farther away have larger variances and thus the pronounced differences.
• Is there a difference between IPv4 measurements vs. IPv6.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  There will be a Doodle poll. January week of 14-18,  10 pm Pacific time (Nb now on winter time); a day later 11:00 am Pakistan time; 11:30 am India time; 2:00 pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time;  1:00 pm Thailand time; 8:00 am Jordan time. (I think).  We moved the time forward by 2 hours to accommodate the time in Jordan.

...

Old information

NUST moved here 12/8/2018

• 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. Disabled 10/3/2018. Wajahat emailed 10/12/2018.
  • pinger.kohat.edu.pk status is that the concerned person is on leave and the other person doesn't know any status of the system at site. 
• cae.seecs.edu.pk last time we were able to gather any data was February 27th. Disabled 8/19/2018. Wajahat emailed 10/12/2018.For several months we were unable to gather data from pinger.isra.edu.pk starting 3/6/2018, also it did not ping. Then it started working as of September 2nd, 2018 and we gathered data for 3 days. Failed again starting on Sept 5th. At this time (Sept 6^th) it was pinging, however, all pings failed (i.e. no response after 31 pings). Now (10/14/2018) it is not pingable.
  • cae.seecs.edu.pk status is that the system at node is totally out of order. The system isn't in working condition. The concerned person there requires full technical support on how the linux can be installed and used. He knows windows only. He also requires all the support on making the system run the pinger scripts etc.
• Wajahat now has a permanent staff engineer so that person can be trained on how to manage MAs and possibly improve the installation process. How is it going? What Pakistani hosts are now working, do I need to re-enable any hosts. The only hosts we try to gather data from are seen in http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/checkdata/.  They are:

  • comsatsswl.seecs.edu, maggie1.seecs.edu.pk, maggie2.seecs.edu.pk, monitor.seecs.edu.pk, 
    pinger.isra.edu.pk (no data since 5th Sept 2018, so it is a candidate to Disable), 
    pinger.nwfpuet.edu.pk, pinger.vu.edu.pk

...

• Wajahat will provide a list of working or potentially working Pakistani MAs to Les, and if they are not enabled, Les will enter or re-enable the gathering of data from these MAs.

• 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. Disabled 10/3/2018. Wajahat emailed 10/12/2018.
  • pinger.kohat.edu.pk status is that the concerned person is on leave and the other person doesn't know any status of the system at site. 
• cae.seecs.edu.pk last time we were able to gather any data was February 27th. Disabled 8/19/2018. Wajahat emailed 10/12/2018.For several months we were unable to gather data from pinger.isra.edu.pk starting 3/6/2018, also it did not ping. Then it started working as of September 2nd, 2018 and we gathered data for 3 days. Failed again starting on Sept 5th. At this time (Sept 6^th) it was pinging, however, all pings failed (i.e. no response after 31 pings). Now (10/14/2018) it is not pingable.
  • cae.seecs.edu.pk status is that the system at node is totally out of order. The system isn't in working condition. The concerned person there requires full technical support on how the linux can be installed and used. He knows windows only. He also requires all the support on making the system run the pinger scripts etc.
• Wajahat now has a permanent staff engineer so that person can be trained on how to manage MAs and possibly improve the installation process. How is it going? What Pakistani hosts are now working, do I need to re-enable any hosts. The only hosts we try to gather data from are seen in http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/checkdata/.  They are:

  • comsatsswl.seecs.edu, maggie1.seecs.edu.pk, maggie2.seecs.edu.pk, monitor.seecs.edu.pk,
    pinger.isra.edu.pk (no data since 5th Sept 2018, so it is a candidate to Disable),
    pinger.nwfpuet.edu.pk, pinger.vu.edu.pk

UAF/GHZU (Updated 11/19/2018)

• Saqib's future at GZHU will be much clearer after November, current contract expires February 2019. 
• Gathering data is no longer working. Saqib tried to make the Beijing MA live again. However, he has little control over it as it is in the CERNET cloud. We have given up. It has been Disabled.

PingER at SLAC  (Updated 11/19/2018)

PingER IPV6 support

• Les cleaned up the Beacons and added some more hosts. Now have 161 Beacons in  156 different countries, all are working.
• We now monitor 830 targets from SLAC this is an increase of ~100 in the last year and is the most monitored from SLAC ever.
• We are monitoring 48 IPv6 nodes from SLAC.
• There is a problem gathering data from  2001:da8:270:2018:f816:3eff:fef3:bd3 the Guangzhou IPv6 host in Beijing. 

Context:

• Is there any statistical difference between ICMP and TCP Ping? The context here is the Internet (not data center). This is important because the network stack is different (e.g., MPI over infiniband) and latencies are significantly less.

Questions:

• Why should we focus on minimum RTT instead of average RTT
  • Min RTT essentially reflects fixed delay, while average RTT subsumes variations and path load
  • Link to raw results with minRTT results:
    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZPgljFCDFcsVUxEFA6NYMjhayoqYtMYi
• Are the R plots generated using minRTT?
  • Averages and computed. Min RTT is available. Scripts need to be updated to use minRTT.
• What is the breakdown of latency between endpoints? If there is a difference, is it because of the type or location of the source? What if the source of traffic was not SLAC? Is there a correlation with the distance between the endpoints?
  • Latency for an echo packet to travel up the stack and back down is about 3.75 micro seconds (see StackMap https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/yasukata). As expected, this is negligible when considered with milli second latencies.The remaining components would be propagation and queuing delay. As we can not breakdown the two in a public network without using an active look like
    • To replicate use system tap. See: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/419449/how-can-i-determine-if-a-latency-is-due-to-a-driver-or-the-scheduler
  • pathchirp etc, we'll continue to consider these as a single component.
• Are the differences limited to a particular region? How do we determine/understand if traffic prioritization is implemented?Test in a controlled environment to avoid variables such as traffic prioritization, queuing delay due to cross traffic. Review the time series of latencies for both ICMP and TCP ping, instead of averages?
  • It may be that end hosts which are farther away have larger variances and thus the pronounced differences.
• Is there a difference between IPv4 measurements vs. IPv6.

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  There is a Doodle poll. December week of 10-13,  8 pm Pacific time (Nb now on winter time); day later 9:00 am Pakistan time; 9:30 am India time; 12:00 noon Malaysian & Guangzhou time; and 11 am Thailand time.

...

GZHU moved 11/28/2018

Blockchain

...