...
Johari recommended a future PingEr workshop later this year. This time it would be in Peninsular Malaysia hosted at either UTM or UM. This should be a topic for the next meeting, i.e. who should host it, dates etc.
Funding
Johari has put together a proposal for FRGS (Fundamental Research Grant Scheme). There are rough minutes of a discussion on funding held between SEECS, UNIMAS and SLAC following the workshop. The action items were:
We will pursue the Exploratory Research Grant for Initial data in order to support setting up three or more PingER monitoring hosts in Malaysia. Potential sites are UM, MYREN, UTM, and UNIMAS. This will the basis of a larger deployment in Malaysia. This in turn will provide end-to-end active current and archival monitoring data. This can be mined for research in:
- understand the intra-Malaysia end-to-end Internet performance, identifying
- bottlenecks,
- poor performance and reasons
- making recommendations for better performance
- comparing Intra-Malaysian Internet performance with other regions
- looking for correlations across multiple routes
- Identifying anomalies
The infrastructure can also be used to provide landmarks for measuring RTT to target hosts for geolocation research
Anjum shared proposals from NUST can be used as input to various proposals.
Johari will review the proposals and put together a draft.
Johari has a draft, it needs polishing. He will email it to the team on Monday 14th January. He proposes submitting for a FRGS grant. It will be a 2 year project with a maximum of 150K RM. It is for a single MS student. Both UTM and UM expressed enthusiasm to join. Hanan wil be the UTM contact, Abdullah will be the UM contact. The objective will be to set up a PingER monitoring site infrastructure in Malaysia. This will be used to gather end-to-end active monitoring data both within Malaysia, to S. E. Asia and to the rest of the world. This data will be mined to understand the status of Internet connectivity, set baselines, identify problem areas, make recommendations etc.5 members of the proposal (5 is the max). Johari decided to get 2 more people from the group in UNIMAS to join the PingER project, thus we are unable to include our counterparts in UM and UTM (Dr Abdullah and Prof Hanan). We can go for a bigger project such as the eScience or LRGS (Long-term Research Grant Scheme) which can accomodate a larger number of people, more funding and encourage cross institutions collaboration.
At a later stage the infrastructure and data can be used for research in: anomaly detection; correlation of performance across multiple routes; and for GeoLocation. Johari would like to see UM and UTM, which are research universities, strongly engaged in the next round of research proposals. Anjum mentioned a paper on Evaluation of IP Geolocation Algorithms on PingER and PlanetLab Infrastructures , by Fida Gilani et. al. submitted to IEEE INFOCOM 2011UNIMAS. THis could be updated with new data and maybe submitted to a different venue. Anjum will forward forwarded a copy of the paper to Johari, Abdullah and Hanan with copies to the team. The idea is to see whether there is interest at UTM, UM or UNIMAS.
UNIMAS
There is a problem with the UNIMAS traceroute. It appears pinger.unimas.my is behind a NAT that is not passing the traceroute UDP probes. Other hosts at UNIMAS are not seeing the problem, so Johari believes it may have to do with the IPTABLES in pinger.unimas.my. Traceroute using the -I option (send the probes using ICMP rather than UDP) seems to work (but needs root access). Thus it would appear not to be in the return (ICMP "time exceeded") response. The probes (when not using the -I option are UDP packets using sequentially ports 33434 - 33465 (for up to 30 hops). It is possible that ports > some number may be blocked. Johari will set up a guest account for Anjum who will logon and look around and see if he can assist. The traceroute/ping server is important for the TULIP trilateration project.
...