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Johari recommended a future PingER workshop later this year. This time it would be in a Peninsular Malaysia site hosted at either UTM or UM. Hanan at UTM has agreed to take the lead. We need to get 4 or 5 universities involved. We will need travel funding to fund Les. Les has provided his CV to assist in the paper work. This may be associated with a thesis review or something similar. Update Hanan?
We need to set some dates. Anjum prefers it to be out of semester time but that is not critical. Les has a constraint starting July 12th through August 4th. Hanan may have a constraint early June. Malaysia has a lot of public holidays. What is the period that we are looking at? (June - July?).
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Apart from that, if we target a lot of academicians, then the best time would be during semester break, we will get the dates for that.
Hanan, we need to get moving on this. Should we set up a Doodle page, see http://doodle.com/?locale=en (http://doodle.com/?locale=en*)?
Funding
Johari has submitted a proposal for FRGS (Fundamental Research Grant Scheme). There are 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 accommodate a larger number of people, more funding and encourage cross institutions collaboration. Any Update Johari?
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 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. Johari has put together a draft that has been reviewed by Anjum. It will need to be shared when closer to completion. Update Johari?
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. Update Johari, Anjum.
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It is not easy to find such sites in those states. Obvious targets are universities, for example UUM in Kedah and UNIMAP in Perlis, but those sites are not ping-able. One way is to approach these universities and explain to them about PingER project and request for the ping packet to be enable. Les has sent HostFinder.pl to Johari to possibly assist in finding hosts.
UM
Dr Nor Badrul Anuar Jumaat has installedl PingER on a cloud at UM. The machines are virtualized and running Ubuntu Linux.UTM & UM will need to address 1 The name and address of the server is pinger.fsktm.um.edu.my (202.185.107.238). The UM monitoring host has been added to the NODELIST PingER meta data base at SLAC and the <HostList> for Malaysian and S.E Asian hosts has been added to the pinger.xml file at UM. We need to get the latest pinger2.pl installed. Since the traceroute is working, "we" can start to make a routing study similar to https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Routing+from+UNIMAS. Badrul has a student who will be working on the case study and will coordinate with Saqib at UTM and Johari at UNIMAS to combine results and to put together a paper for the Malaysian ISI Journal probably around the end of June
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Arshad and the NUST Rector visited UM and UTM earlier this week. They visited UM Monday at about 10:30AM along with the NUST Pakistan delegation. They visited the Deputy Vice Chancellor and the EE Dept in Faculty of Engineering. At this occasion they also sent email to Abdullah, Fidah, Badrul, and Salwa, to engage in a discussion on collaboration in the PingER project being pursued by NUST team in partnership with Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) USA. Badrul was unable to meet due to the short notice and a prior engagement. The visit to UTM was postponed due to the NUST rector getting sick.
Any feed back - Anjum?
Kashif reports that the Multan PoP node was under observation for many days. Now its working fine with little bit of un-reachability. It has been added back to the list of Monitors in the meta database.
Potential projects
Ipv6
With Malaysia moving quickly to IPv6 (already Nava at USM has sent Les an IPv6 address that he recommends monitoring), converting PingER (especially the gathering, analysis) work with IPv6 is an interesting problem. Anjum believes he could provide an undergraduate to start on this. SLAC looks like it may be getting some traction to enable IPv6 on a some subnets. We have an official Provider Indpendent IPV6 address space and are putting together a small project. We will start with DNS, the site web server and email.
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Coordinate and lead the installation of PingER monitoring at multiple Malayisan sites
Build and install a new http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/pingER-2.0.2.tar.gz file with the improved version of pinger2.pl
PingER at SLAC
The annual report to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity (SCIC) has also been completed. Les has been invited to give a general colloquiam at SLAC on the Internet where it came from, challenges and how it is performing. the latter section will report some PingER case studies and measurements.
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