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This is a project suggested by Bebo White to build a PingER monitoring host based on an inexpensive piece of hardware called Raspberry Pi (see more about Raspberry Pi) using a linux distribution as OS (see more about Raspbian). If successful one could consider using these in production reducing the costs, power drain (they draw about 2W of 5V DC power compared to typically over 100W for a deskside computer or 20W for a laptop) and space (credit card size) assisting monitoring sites to be able to procure and support such monitoring hosts. This could be very valuable for sites in developing countries where cost, power utilization and to a lesser extent space may be crucial.

PingER

PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) is the name given to the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) project to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links. It is led by SLAC and development includes NUST/SEECS (formerly NIIT), FNAL, and ICTP/Trieste, together with UM,UNIMAS and UTM in Malaysia. Originally, in 1995 it was for the High Energy Physics community, however, this century it has been more focused on measuring the Digital Divide from an Internet Performance viewpoint. The project now involves measurements to over 700 sites in over 160 countries, and we are actively seeking new sites to monitor and monitoring sites for this project, as well as people interested in our data. It uses the ubiquitous ping facility.

Measurements are made by ~60 measurement Agents (MAs) in 23 countries. They make measurements to over 700 targets in ~ 160 countries containing more than 99% of the world's connected population. The measurement cycle is scheduled at roughly 30 minute intervals. At each measurement cycle, each MA issues a set of pings to each target, stopping when it receives 10 ping responses or it has issued 30 ping requests. From each  set of pings one can derive various metrics such as minimum (Min) ping Round Trip Time (RTT) response, average (Avg) RTT, maximum (Max)  RTT, standard deviation (Stdev) of RTTs, 25% probability of RTT, 75% probability of RTT, Inter Quartile Range (IQR, )loss, reachability (host is unreachable if get 100 % loss).

Raspberry Pi Model and Specifications

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The installed system is called Raspbian a Debian Linux variant. The OS had Perl, Make, dig, ping and mail installed. We accessed it through the graphic interface of Raspbian. We just had to install: Apache and XML::Simple.

Installation of PingER2 MA on Raspberry Pi

The first step, before start the installation process we had to change the hostname in Raspbian.

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The table below shows the various aggregate metrics measured from monitor to target comparing pinger.slac.stanford with pinger-raspberry.slac.stanford.edu. The columns are arranged in pairs. The first of each pair is for pingerr.slac.stanford.edu, the second for pinger-raspberry.slac.stanford.edu. Each pair is measured over the same time period. Different pairs are measured over different time periods. 

Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test

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