Page History

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Wednesday Jul 27 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Jul 28, 2016  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Jul 28  2016 12:00noon Malaysian time, Thursday Jul 28 2016 02:00am Rio Time.  

Coordinates of team members:

See: http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php

Attendees

Invitees:

Hassaan Khaliq, Muhammad Anas Abrar (SEECS); Saqib+, Aqsa (UAF); Johari, Adnan Khan (UNIMAS);  Badrul,  Ridzuan, Ibrahim (UM); (UTM); Adib+, Fatima (UUM); Fizi Jalil (MYREN);  Les+, Bebo-, Joao (SLAC).

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- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

? Individual emails sent

Actual attendees:

Joao, Adib, Les

Administration

• Membership of pinger-my in https://groups.google.com

Android - Bebo 

No update 5/18/2016

Bebo has set up a Github codebase  as a new project. It contains the PingER MA (pinger2.pl and the traceroute/ping server). Anyone  needs to sign up for a Github account (if you don't already have one), so you can be added as a project member.

• slac-pinger/pinger created by topherwhite.  PingER project https://github.com/slac-pinger/pinger
• Now we have it we can share with Amity to check it works.
  • Bebo reports that someone from Amity requested to be a member of the Android group.

UUM

No update 5/18/2016

From Adib:

• "Since we're still waiting on an account, at SLAC, I asked the student to explore another idea (which is quite relevant) proposed by Prof. Bebo “Creative visualization of PingER data, including rich interaction;”. He has already started looking at the possible attractive/interactive design, at the same time he is working to improve his programming skills."

• "On the other hand, I am in the final stage of writing a case study on the Internet performance in ASEAN countries and its implication on the Socio-Economic Indexes. Will try to share with Dr.Les and Prof. Bebo soon to comment and get your advice on the publication possibility of the paper."

• Adib has created a case study SE Asia (ASEAN). Les to read the study provide feedback international connectivity for leaders of the country.
• Adamu expecting baby so very busy early next month. So no progress.
• There is another student, (Jaafrau) has a design.  Looking at visualization.
• Adib has a student from Thailand who is working with Adib at UUM who  may be interested in installaing a PIngER MA in Thailand. Adib will talk next week after exams to see if can get permissions.

UNIMAS

No update 5/18/2016

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UAF (Saqib)

There are 4 students:  Aqsa Hameed, Saba Muzamil, Tahseen and Sara Masood. They are all busy this week and last week with exams. We can expect more updates in a couple of weeks time when the exams are done.T

• Aqsa has completed her research work on "visualization on pingER data" and now working on to publish a conference paper. Here are few details of the research work.

  • The query results can be exported as CSV file. I use the CSV file of Query results from Impala to draw Line and Bar charts by using Google API.

  • She has created a Data warehouse on pingER data. First we transform the pingER text files into CSV files. Then i upload these CSV files on HDFS and populate Impala Tables and queries.

  • Line and Bar charts are created on a webpage running or executed by localhost server. it can be updated as the query results varies.

• Aqsa has put together an  abstract of a conference paper and submitted to "The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Science, Engineering and Applications (BDSEA 2016)" (http://computing.derby.ac.uk/bdcat2016/).  "Applying Big Data Warehousing and Visualization Techniques on pingER Data",  Aqsa Hameed, Dr. Saqib Ali, Dr. Les Cottrell and Bebo White, submitted to BDSEA 2016  

• Aqsa and Saba are working together. Their goal is focusing on visualization of PingER historical data using warehouse.  The idea is to develop a warehouse in UAF university and make it publicly available. They are 50-60% done with setting up a Hadoop cluster with 3 nodes, 1 master, 2 slaves. She is currently working on importing the PingER data into hdfs on the  cluster. they have run some Impala queries on the data and are working on visualization
• Topic: visualization on pingER data (email from Aqsa and Response from Renan)

  I have studied the google charts as visualization tools but here are some points need to be discussed.
  1. The idea of applying visualization on Data warehouse (Impala query results) does not seem to be so useful because Data warehouse contains static data and visualization charts will also remains static and need to be updated with the time.
  
  Yes, it needs to be updated with the time. My suggestion is to transform PingER data into data to be inserted into the data warehouse. Myself and some other Brazilian students have developed codes to do this. Such process should occur at least once a day to keep the data warehouse updated daily. This has never been done by any of us.
  
  2. Google charts API cannot integrate with Impala As Impala is hadoop distributed Big Data supported database Google can only integrate with flat files or flat databases like Mysql. 
  
  If Google charts API can only read flat files (e.g., CSV files), it is trivial to save a database query result as a CSV flat file that would be consumed by Google charts.  Can Google charts generate a plot dynamically after reading a just-created CSV file? 
  Is using a different data visualization library (e.g., D3 https://d3js.org/ ) an option? 

• Aqsa and  team members are working on creating Data warehouse and we are very close to complete this. Here are some updates.

  • Tehseen qureshi has transformed the pingER text files into binaries and soon he will be able to get CSV files.

  • Saba is working on defining a 4 node cluster.
  • Aqsa has uploaded some sample CSV files on HDFS and run Impala queries as i will get the actual CSV from tehseen these steps are also will be completed

• Visualization Status 

• Aqsa has 

  drawn a line chart and bar chart on the data of sample CSV file and i am exploring some more charts to be drawn by using Google API's.

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Saqib will proceed to install Pinger in UAF Pakistan

UTM 

Saqib's old supervisor  agreed to appoint a master student to take of PingER in UTM. Saqib has emailed  3/9/2016, no progress 4/6/2016, no progress 5/18/2016. 

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2.     For the M.Sc. student in UTM we have to request again to Prof Hanan and Prof Asri and we need support from Prof Johari.

UM

MYREN

• Email 6/15/2016 to Fitzi, pinger.fsksm.utm.my is down.

NUST

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PingER at SLAC

Joao making the data on FTP to be up-to-date. 

Also has a 4 node cluster with Cloudera manager for Hadoop, Next step are to get impala working for queries.

 Working on the following hosts to be able to gather data

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  Wednesday Jul  27 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday Jul 28, 2016  9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday Jul 28  2016 12:00noon Malaysian time, Thursday Jul 28 2016 02:00am Rio Standard Time.  

Old Items

Visualization ideas for PingER moved here 5/20/2016

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• article on PingER and African Internet performance, see  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-tereshchuk/a-giant-leap-in-2016-africa_b_8901556.html

• Anjum said it would be good for Hassaan to attach this to his proposal. Any action?

• Les is working with the SLAC CIO to try and put something together for publicity concerning the life of PingER. 

UOA (Saqib) placed here 2/3/2016.

Saqib has a  5  MS students from the Database team

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• Jan 5, 2015 Hassaan reports "I have received revisions on my proposal and these days I am revising my proposal. In the meanwhile, I have also added another student (Anas Abrar) on this project. He is in learning phase and will follow the nodes which are not working. I shall give you an update very soon. "

  •  Hassaan is  very hopeful that if the proposal is accepted then we can easily have a full time RA for the project.

  Hassaan has re-submitted the proposal after revisions. He would like to get Anas Abrar more trained on monitoring operation and then will inform us to add him to the mailing list at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/contact.php.

   

• Oct 2015. Following the last meeting, Anjum, Hassaan and Les met to discuss the way forward. 

  • "Adnan currently is unable to find resources for handling the project. Similarly, there is no progress on hiring of a full time RA by NUST HQ. 
  • However, I (Hassaan) checked from HEC about the proposal that I submitted last year. They have informed me that 2 reviewers have asked for revisions while they are waiting for the third review. I am very hopefull about it. If the proposal is accepted then we can easily have a full time RA for the project. I have plans to talk to Dr. Zaidi about hiring an RA on assuming that our proposal will be accepted by HEC. We can then get his salary deducted later from the HEC project. I shall update you very soon in this regard." 

  • Hassaan is  waiting to hear from HEC about the comments on the proposal. 

  • Moreover, he has asked a student to work on the project for the time being. His name is Mian Anas however he will need few weeks to understand the project. 

• Thiago completed setting up the  PingER data SQL Impala warehouse running on a Nebula/Cloudera cluster using the Hadoop File System (HDFS). Unfortunately it is not currently accessible from outside SLAC. There have been several attempts to provide outside access, but no success yet, we need to engage the subject matter experts. Thiago is now a SLAC associate so he still has an account at SLAC. There was a cyber security alert on the version of java installed with Cloudera. Les has replaced the cloudera version of java which should fix the vulnerability. However the new version has not been tested.

Geolocation

Anjum believes the TULIP Geolocation application  can be improved significantly. At least there are few ideas that we can try. For this, either a group of undergraduate students or an active masters student is required. The resultant work can easily be the thesis of masters level. Who is interested? 

• Saqib at Faisalabad has an MS student interested to work on Geolocation project. He requests an initial  paper on the project.  Les has responded to Saqib. He also has some other students. Anjum will contact him. Potential projects/asks include: take over management of PingER monitoring in Pakistan (say 5 monitors/student; case study of how Pakistan's network performance/connectivity has improved over thea years especially as function of funding etc;  geolocation with variable alpha; indoor geolocation

• Johari will contact Anjum to learn more of the requirements. Update Johari/Adnan

• See http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/tulip/. Basically TULIP uses pings to a target from landmarks at known locations and converts the minimum RTTs to estimate the distances. Then uses the distances with mulitlateration to estimate the location of the target

• To improve TULIP one needs the right selection of landmarks, i.e. good (working landmarks) at the right locations (not too far from the target), straddling the target, and with a a reasonable estimate of the indirectness (directivity or alpha) of the path from the landmark to the target (so we can reasonably accurately estimate the distance). One also needs a reasonable density of landmarks (e.g. number of targets/100,000sq km)

• The landmarks come from PingER and perfSONAR sites.  We have a reasonable density in the US, Pakistan and Europe. Currently Anjum is getting better than 20km accuracy for Pakistani targets

• As the number of landmarks goes up so does the accuracy, but so does the time to make the measurements (pings). 

• One needs to find the optimal density

• Anjum proposes to speed up the measurements using a cluster for parallelization and also proposes to improve the adaptation of alpha based region. He regards the adaptive geolocation and parallelization as  MS projects. 

• He is also interested in geolocation in small proximity (e.g.indoors), e.g. using cell tower signals. This is a new area of research. It is possible that the port of PingER to an Android could  be related to this. This is a PhD project

• Anjum reports he can supervise the students on Geolocation. He will need to know when the students are ready. We can start with a joint meeting involving Les and the students. Later on, Anjum can have the meeting with students every week while Les can join if he has time.

NUST/SEECS Pakistani PingER nodes status

Pink Background indicates host was bad last month, strike through says it is fixed, yellow is an new bad host.

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Is it time to start paring down the list of PingER monitor hosts in Pakistan, starting with those that have been down for a while and despite your efforts they are not cooperating.  One might also look at the coverage by region in Pakistan and try and keep good coverage for all regions.

Traceroute at UTM 5/9/2015

The traceroute problem regarding maximum reachable hops ( i.e. 11 hopes ) may be since the Unix/Linux/OSX  traceroute uses UDP to send the requests. The first request is sent to a particular port (33434), with a ttl  to tell it how many hops to go to.  The ttl starts at 1 is incremented as it tries the next hop, also the port is incremented (up to 33465).  It looks like the first few UDP ports are enabled and then they are blocked. The Windows traceroute uses ICMP to send the probes so does not see the problem.

Linked Open Data

Cristiane reports (7/1/2015): "I am trying to automatize the triplification of PingER data on Kettle. For now, part of the transformation is made on Kettle and another is made by a Java code. Although this solution works for a data sample, is important to have the entire process on Kettle because it facilitates to understand, modify and control the triplification process."

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Christiane's report is at: Size Inflation of PingER Data for use in PingER LOD

UM

Moved here 3/4/2015:

Ibrahim has setup distributed hadoop clusters. He has 2TB of disk space. Les has provided information on getting a subset of PingER data by anonymous ftp via ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/users/cottrell.  It was put there last September. Information on how the data was put together is at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Archiving+PingER+data+by+tar+for+retrieval+by+anonymous+ftp. There is information on formatting etc at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/retrievedata.html and some on the dataflows at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+data+flow+at+SLAC. Renan at UFRJ has successfully used this data, he has also characterized the data in terms of bytes/metric per year etc.

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Anjum reported that UM had experienced a TCP syn DOS attack prior to Mar 12th (when an IDS was put in place). It occurred mainly for several days before between the hours on noon- 2pm and 7-7 in the evening (Malaysia time). He suggested looking to see if PingER could spit the effect.  Ibrahim, Les and Anjum will look at. Les analyzed the data and sent it to Anjum

NUST

The following is from Samad 2/24/2015.

• buitms.seecs.edu.pk #We have to disable gathering data from this host because the person still don't want to continue with us as i have tried once again to convince him but the answer is same. Les has disabled from SLAC. 
• nukhimain.seecs.edu.pk # We were unable to gather data since 20th November, 2014 and now the Node is working fine and collecting data as well. 
• pinger.uettaxila.edu.pk #The node is working fine from last two weeks. 
• sau.seecs.edu.pk. #This Node is working fine now. 
• pingerjms.pern.edu.pk #This node is working now. 
• pinger.uet.edu.pk # this was also not working from so many days. and now its working fine and collecting data as well. 
• pinger.isra.edu.pk # This node is also working fine now.
• pingerlhr-pu.pern.edu.pk # This is also working fine now.
• pinger.kohat.edu.pk # Collecting data now.

• The IP of "pingerqta.pern.edu.pk" has been changed, Les has updated the databas at SLAC with the following

  DNS: pingerqta.pern.edu.pk 

  Old IP: 121.52.157.157 

  New IP: 121.52.157.148

Follow up from workshop

• Hossein Javedani of UTM is interested in anomalous event detection with PingER data. Information on this is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Event+Detection. We have sent him a couple of papers and how to access the PingER data. Hossein and Badrul have been put in contact. Is there an update Badrul?

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Anjum suggested Saqib,  Badrul and Johari put together a paper on user experiences with using the Internet in Malaysia as seen from Malaysian universities. In particular round trip time, losses, jitter, reliability, routing/peering, in particular anomalies, and the impact on VoIP, throughput etc.  It would be good to engage someone from MYREN.

Ibrahim

Ibrahim Abaker  is planning to work on a topic initially entitled " leveraging pingER big data with a modified pingtable for event-correlation and clustering".  Ibrahim has a proposal, see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17162/leveraging+pingER+big+data+with+a+modified+pingtable+for+event-correlation+and+clustering.docx. Ibrahim reports 7/15/2014 "I have spent the last few months trying to understand the concept of big data storage and its retrieval as well as the traditional approach of storing RDF data. I have integrated a single hadoop cluster in our cloud. but for this project we need multiple clusters, which I have already discussed with Dr. Badrul and he will provide me with big storage for the experiment." No Update 8/20/2014.

"I have come up with initial proposed solution model. This model consists of several parts. The upper parts of the Figure below shows the data source, in which PingER data will be convert into RDF format. Then the data pre-processor will take care of converting RDF/XML into N-triples serialization formats using N-triples convertor module. This N-triple file of an RDF graph will be as an input and stores the triples in storage as a key value pair using MapReduce jobs"

Potential projects

See list of Projects

1)  pingER  monitoring host on android .

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