Time & date

Wednesday 20 27 March  2013 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday March  21  28 2013 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday March 21 28 2013 12:00 noon Malaysian time.

Attendees

Invitees: Anjum, Kashif, Johari, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul, Hanan, Fidah, Saqib, Les, Raja-, Umar and Bebo  

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- Unable to attend

Actual attendees: 

General

Johari has set up a web landing site for the Malaysian collaboration. It  is at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger.  It contains:

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Assuming we can get these issues addressed, our legal folks think we could seek DOE approval and enter into an agreement with these other universities. We need to hear back from UTM and UM whether we need/want to pursue this further. It will probably be a considerable effort. UTM & UM will need to address 1. We all need to think about 3. 4 is easy,  2 is doable, 7 and 8 are tricky.

Workshops

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. *It looks like it will be the week of June 24-29 at University of Malaya. For exact date, will decide at the end of the month after discussing with Abdullah and Johari.

Will Anjum and Kashif attend, is funding needed? What about Bebo? Update Hanan?

Funding/Proposals

Johari has submitted a proposal for FRGS (Fundamental Research Grant Scheme). We hope to hear more in April.  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. As for research, we need to clarify a few matters: 

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 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. 

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.

Johari has set up a guest account for Anjum. Anjum logged on and reported some concerns about addresses and interfaces not matching. The traceroute/ping server is important for the TULIP trilateration project and also understanding routing within and from Malaysia.

UTM

The UTM Pinger site is http://pinger.fsksm.utm.my/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl to get the data. .  

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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

NUST

From Arshad: Rector has agreed to support one person visit to SLAC. Raja has been nominated.    Invitation was sent to Raja  just before the last meeting.

Arshad and the NUST Rector visited were to visit 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?*. *However, this fell through due the Rector being sick.

Potential projects

See list of Projects

Managing <HostList> for Malaysia from Johari

Since the number of monitoring nodes in Malaysia is likely to grow, I think it is a good idea to start thinking of automated ways of synchronizing the <HostList> section. A few thoughts on this matter:

• we can use the same approach as the automatic updating/sync of the Beacon List. This would require modifications to pinger2.pl
• which node will be the trusted/root node in Malaysia for updating? since any single monitoring host can add any number of new hosts, might a mechanism to cross check between monitoring hosts.

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. SLAC has an official Provider Indpendent IPV6 address space and are putting together a small project. We will start with the site web server and email.

Bebo's suggestions

(1) Creative visualization of PINGer data including rich interaction;

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With PingER going back over a decade, its presentation tools tend to be a  bit jaded having in some cases been developed in the 90's. New, modern ways to access display and navigate the data would be a  big plus.

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. 

TULIP

Raja has completed the MATLAB script and used it to generate some input files for Pakistan and Europe. However using the alpha values (function of both region and RTT value) found through the alpha analysis the distances were underestimates in some cases. He is working on finding the cause and possible solution.

Future meeting  - Les

Next meeting Wednesday ?  2013 9:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday ? 2013 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday ? 2013 12:00 noon Malaysian time.

Future agenda items:

Workshop: dates, funding, other sites

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Case studies: routing, performance for Malaysia and S.E. Asia. We need someone to take the lead on this for Malaysia.

Coordinates: