Time & date
This meeting: November 05????, 2020 9 pm Pacific time; a day later 9:00 am Pakistan time; 10:30 am India time
Invitees:
- Email addresses
- abansal1@amity.edu; assabitha@amity.edu; sachanakshat@gmail.com; cottrell@slac.stanford.edu; saqibutm@outlook.com; bebo@slac.stanford.edu; umar.kalim@gmail.com;
PingER Project Update using Zoom
IMPORTANT NOTE: The meeting is set up to record automatically. By joining the meeting you are agreeing to be recorded (see details)
Agenda:
- Introductions
- US & Pakistani folks
- India folks
- Status of pingeramity.in
- Covid-19 & PingER
- Mobile PingER
Recording of the meeting can be found at:
Minutes:
Attendees:
Amity: Asshat Sachan, Dr. A. Sai Sabitha, Prof. Dr. Abhay Bansai, Samaksh Agarwal, Shivang Gupta, Sakshi Arora, Shwang
US: Bebo White, Umar Kalim
Pakistan: Saqib Ali.
Introductions:
Les Cottrell: Working on keeping PingER running, and on the impact of Covid-19.
...
A Sai Sabitha: as team leader every year she wants to come out with papers concerning applying machine learning to the PingER and Covid data.
Status of pingeramity monitoring host
According to Akshat email 11/9/2020m pingeramity.in is up and running 8:30pm PDT - 4:00am PDT. By means of a cronjob SLAC gathers the data from 204.12.103.71 (pingeramity.in does not resolve by name, hence we use the IP address) via https://pingeramity.in/cgi-bin.ping_data.pl at around 1:30am PDT +-30 mins each morning. However, in the last 100 days only on one day ( Dec 11 1:30am PDT) was the collection script able to gather any data. The data itself was strange in that it appeared as:
pingeramity.in 204.11.58.194 www.andi.dz 213.179.181.44 100 1607593552 10 10 189.987 190.653 193.137 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 190 193 190 190 190 190 191 189 190 190
N.b. Thu Dec 10 09:45:52 2020 GMT for 1607593552
It is strange that the host identifies itself with the IP address 204.11.58.19 rather than the address it was accessed with(204.12.103.71).
Further, the host is only occasionally pingable around the time of each day's measurement (see for example https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/checkdata/ where the host's box is white if the host is blue if there is data, green if there is only data for part of the day, magenta if there is no data but the host is pingable, and white if there is no data and the host is not pingable.
There has been an exchange of emails between Akshat and Les. Akshat reports the machine is up and running and accessible from India, although there have been power problems. Les, however, has been unable to access the web server https://pingeramity.in/cgi-bin.ping_data.pl or http://202.12.103.71/cgi-bin/ping_data.pl. Work is in progress to understand and remedy the situation.
Covid-19 and PingER
Les put together a study of the correlation of PingER and Covid-19 cases. It is at https:confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+and+COVID-19 and was last updated May 19, 2020.
Shivang and Sakshi have been collecting data from the MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development India) site. LIke Johns Hopkins University in the US, MHRD gathers and provides COVID-19 data on cases, deaths etc. for states and cities such as Karnataka, Bangalore, Delhi in India. Now that the pingeramity server is running they are gathering its (latency) data. Besides India they are also looking at USA and Brazil. They then want to compare the pingeramity data with the COVID-19 data looking for correlations.
Mobile PingER
Akshat proposed to extend the ideas of the new Android-Mobile-based PingER to SmartTVs. This will enable a new PingER structure again with static monitors, but new code for the measurements, recording, and distribution. In particular, they will push the data out every 10-20 minutes, as opposed to today's version where we gather the data from the monitors on a daily basis each morning). Also, the new version would be Android based rather than Linux based.
They are also working on porting the current Android PingER that only works in the foreground to one that works in background. Part of the idea is also that it will be able to run on an iPhone. A next step is thus to complete a working version of the new PingER (let's for the moment call it ePingER) that runs in background, supports SmartTV, Android and iOS devices. Since Amity's end of semester is coming up with semester exams finishing December 11th, a goal was set to shoot for reporting on progress and possible demonstrations on December 21st
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meeting Preparation Notes
Amity
Apart from invitations to present papers at upcoming conferences we heard from Amity since Sep 4, 2020 when they forwarded an email originating July 11, 2020.
...
Concerning the Android App, Umar pointed out that we need to understand/specify the end goal of the project. The project can support mobility since it records GPS coordinates. One needs to decide how to utilize the data gathered. It can be useful for evaluating Telco service providers. Unlike today's PingER which has continuous data between monitoring stations and targets, we would expect the mobile data to be much more sparse both in terms of time and monitors (cell-phones). Further, it is community-driven rather than centrally. It would appear to be similar to Thousand Eyes or Speedtest app that enables cell phone users to make on-demand measurements of throughput from their phones to targets around the world. The measurements would be archived and can then be summarized and reports presented, e.g. comparing connectivity from area to area on maps and or by a carrier. Telcos are also making such connectivity measurements for their network. An advantage of the current proposal is that it would be across service providers, and also have less network impact than say Speedtest.
pingeramity.in
No data since Jan 6, 2020. Cannot ping gives unknown host. Email from Amity Sep 4, 2020: "Also, for our Amity SLAC server, physical access is not possible and therefore we are unable to configure the scripts manually there and hence it is running offline. It will be set as soon as the college reopens." Is there any idea when this may occur or what has to happen before the college is allowed to open?
Disabled by Cottrell 10/19/2020
SLAC Overview
PingER is still actively monitoring from 15 sites in 10 countries (US, Canada, Pakistan, Malaysia, Germany, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, Brazil, South Africa). Apart from SLAC, the monitoring sites each monitor 171 Beacons. SLAC monitors over 700 monitored hosts in 171 countries including all continents except Antarctica. See https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/sites-per-country.html. Also, see the state of various problem monitoring hosts below.
Covid-19 in S. Asia and US
While the median age for Pakistan is quite young (late 20's to early 30's) and that the fact the population leans to B+- rather than A+- blood both should help reduce the incidence, this would not appear to be a big difference between India and Pakistan. Saqib mentioned that a difference might be in the way Pakistan imposes a hard 2 week lockdowns (enforced by police with barricades) on small areas (e.g. a street in Islamabad) where there is an outbreak. There may also be some under-reporting.
Covid-19 data
Les is working on analyzing the data from Johns Hopkins University on confirmed cases. and deaths with a library of reports at https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/excel, including:
...