Minutes for SLAC SEECS Meeting March 6th, 2012
General
We may not be able to get the MATLAB Toolkit for Tulip. Dr. Anjum proposed that we can use Mathemetica instead of MATLAB. He also proposed that he will try to find out some MS students who might take this conversion as his MS thesis. Students have to finalize their thesis by 6th April. By the second week of April, we will get to know if we have any student doing this.
Bilal and Dr. Anjum were unavailable this week, pre-informed. Ghulam did not show up.
IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam (this has been de-prioritized until new database PingER is working)
Les has the passwords for the IPv6 host at SEECS. He still has to try it.
...
Next we need to make pingtable.pl and getdata.pl IPV6 capable, again this could use the 2 subroutines. Since Ghulam and Sadia are working on these it would be good for them to add this.
pinger2.pl
Joun has installed the latest version pinger2.pl that is not supposed to lose <BeaconsList> at 3 sites (cae.seecs.edu.pk, maggie2.seecs.edu.pk, aup.seecs.edu.pk). A month later after install the <BeaconsList> appears OK on all three. Joun may want to extend the deployment of the new pinger2.pl.
PingER Updates
- Collection status webpage generates an email if a node does not work for more than 10 days. Update the script to report bug that for first n days we do not get report.
- Connectivity.pl is fixed to display the latest data (of hours of day that have passed) results on the web.
- Harvey Newman sent new measurement results of HDI for 2011. These new results have been added to both Motion charts and Pinger Data explorer. Both of them are working fine.
- Amber is working on creating smokeping plots for today's data.
HEC Report - Anjum, Amber and Imdad
The report is in Case studies at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PERN+Six+Monthly+Report+%28June+2011-+November+2011%29.
...
The report was supposed to be submitted last monday. A few changes were made in the conclusions and an executive summary. We wait till next meeting for updates.
Pakistani Host
Joun and Ghulam have arranged to archive the status of Pakistani hosts in http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/daily-report. There is a link from the PingER web site (http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/site.html)
...
SEECS have not heard about the IP change from HEC. Dr Anjum will remind HEC about the IP changes to be made by the end of last week. We wait till nest week for updates.
PingER Archive Site - Ghulam
Current Schema : see here.
...
- How to store raw data for one year
- How should it be sharded
- For how long data should be in database
Sadia :Adding max RTT and Alpha to pingtable.pl and the analyze scripts
- We need the alpha for identifying strange Pakistani routes. This will be done before we move to the new schema, it cannot wait anymore. Sadia has modified analyze hourly and analyze daily for Max RTT, MOS & alpha. She has run the jobs in batch for all days back to 1998. Next step in to analyze the output of data files. There does not appear to be any data in http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl?file=average_rtt&by=by-node&size=100&tick=hourly&year=2012&month=03&from=EDU.SLAC.STANFORD.N3&to=WORLD&ex=none&only=all&dataset=new&percentage=any
- Ghulam there was some problem in pingtable.pl alpha value. For some links alpha was having value of 200 . As we know alpha can have maximum of value 2. So there must be something wrong in calculation. Progress
TULIP - Bilal
Bilal will be delivering three tasks in this week ending 3/7/2012:
...
With the upgrading of the pinger.slac.stanford.edu host from RHEL4 to RHEL6 the mysql databases got lost. Sadia has worked with Fahad to recover the Tulip data base from the recovered sites.xml file. This is almost done.
Possible projects
- There can be a paper kind of talking on Pinger if we could just find the right conference. MCN, ICC and Globecomm do provide network monitoring topics. We can talk of GEO-Location experiences. For example within Pakistan it works fine, however as we go within regions or continents this gets worse. We can publish some stats on that for example. We are yet not ready for Tulip paper.
Wiki Markup See \[https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects\].
- Extend the NODEDETAILS data base to allow entry support for whether the host is currenty pingable.
- Improve the PingER2 installation procedures to make it more robust. This might be something for the person(s) in Pakistan who are responsible for installing PingER2 at the Pakistani monitoring sites. They probably have found where the failures occurs. Also look at the FAQ, and ping_data.pl which has been improved to assist in debugging, could it be further improved (e.g. provide access to the httpd.conf file so one can see if it properly configured)? There are 2 students working on the PingER archive. Is this something they could work on?
- [Fix PingER archiving/analysis package to be IPv6 conformant|IEPM:Make PingER IPV6 compliant]. Will build a proposal for an IPv6 testbed. They will try various transition techniques. A proposal has been prepared and that has been submitted to PTA. Adnan is a co PI. It is being evaluated today. A small testbed has been established in SEECS and the plan to shift some of the network to IPv6. Bilal is part of 3 students involved with PingER and they will be involved with IPv6. They are porting the PingER archive site site to using a database. They have redeveloped the archive site using Umar's documentation. They have set up a small test archive site. They have gathering, archiving, analysis. They will design a new database. They will also try a port of PingER to IPv6.
- Look at RRD event detection based on thresholds and how to extend, maybe adding plateau algorithm. Umar's algorithm did not work in a predictable manner.
- Provide near realtime plots of current pinger data using getdata_all.pl/wget. It will work as a CGI script with a form to select the host, the ping size, and the time frame to plot. It will use wget or getdata_all.pl to get the relevant data and possibly RRD/smokeping to display the data. Amber is looking at.
Future meeting time - Les
- Next meeting on Tuesday 13th March, 2012 at 8:00 pm in US and Wednesday 14th March, 2012 at 9:00am in Pakistan.