Time & date

Wednesday April 10  2013 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday April 11  2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday April  11 2013 11:00am Malaysian time.

Attendees

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

* Confirmed attendance

- Unable to attend

Actual attendees: Anjum, Kashif, Johari, Saqib, Bebo, Les

Workshops

It will be 25-26 June at the University of Malaya. There is a document.

It does not appear possible for UM to fund someone from NUST or Bebo. We have a contingency plan. However Les believes and sent email to Abdullah stating that  it is critically important to have someone from NUST at the workshop. Abdullah asks if UNIMAAS or UTM could fund the NUST person.

For attendees Anjum pointed out it would be good to get 2 representatives from each of the 20 public Malaysian universities. One participant would be from the computer division (more to do with installing and maintaining), the other from Faculty (more for the research side). It would also be good to get a non MYREN University and someone from Malaysia Telecom. Bebo will provide contacts at MIMOS and Manipal.

Funding/Proposals

Johari reported that the FRGS proposal had been accepted. It is for 75K MRs (~$35K). It is for 5 people.

The Next step in funding is to go for bigger research funding, such as LRGS or eScience. We can use the upcoming workshop (1 specific session) to brainstorm and come up with such proposal. We need to do some groundwork before that as well. Johari will take the lead in putting together 1/2 page descriptions of the potential research projects. 

1. Need to identify a few key areas of research related to PingER Malaysia Initiative and this can be shared/publicized through the website. These might include using the infrastructure and data for: anomaly detection; correlation of performance across multiple routes; and for GeoLocation. Future projects as Les listed in Confluence here https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects can also be a good start and also Bebo's suggestion. 
2. Need to synchronize and share research proposals so as not to duplicate research works. how to share? Maybe not through the website, or maybe can create a member only section of the website to share sensitive data such as research proposal?

 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. 

We also agreed that the projects we have been gathering should be divided into Development and Research. Since the last meeting Les did this, see Potential PingER Projects .

UNIMAS

There is a problem with the UNIMAS traceroute. It appears both in pinger.unimas.my and in the Raspberry. 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. He does not believe it is due to the Load Balancer. The traceroute/ping server is important for the TULIP trilateration project and also understanding routing within and from Malaysia.

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

• brief history, description of the project and the objectives
• link to main SLAC page
• Link to NUST site
• list of names, contact details (email, etc), their affiliation, and the scope of job in the project
• a link to the data collected from UNIMAS and also other hosts in UM, USM, and UTM when they have their monitoring host running
• link to meeting minutes for 2013  in Confluence to do: links to minutes from 2012, 2011, and 2010
• Bebo added as an advisor
• details of the workshop in UNIMAS and also slides from the talks and hands on sessions 

To do for the website:

• add some images from the workshop conducted in UNIMAS
• add a list of monitored sites (currently the list is linked directly to the SLAC site)
• add info on research (what to add here? eventually list of research grants, publication, etc) 

Please visit the website, any feedback, corrections, suggestions are much appreciated.

It would help to have an MoU between SLAC and UTM. Based on DOE current MOU policy, using the UNIMAS MOU format will not work. SLAC's legal folks also do not think that merely adding additional parties to the current MOU will work either. The new DOE policy will require a new approval. We may be able to get DOE approval of a Work for Others agreement. To do a WFO agreement we would need, at a minimum:

1. A detailed project description describing the activities each party will perform
2. A description of the deliverables SLAC will provide
3. A schedule with completion dates for the activities
4. The key personnel and contact information for both parties
5. The term for performance of the project activities
6. An explanation of the unique capabilities SLAC will provide to the project not available elsewhere
7. An explanation how the project is compatible with existing SLAC program(s)
8. An explanation how the project enhances the mission of SLAC

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.

UTM

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

The traceroute server is also running. It is at: http://pinger.fsksm.utm.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl. Saqib discovered the problem was a timeout in traceroute.pl. Saqib has extended the timeout and it works better.  There may still be timeout problems and Saqib will experiment with longer timeouts of up to 280ms.

Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia. 

We should discuss:

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

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

Raja has mailed to the SLAC International Studies Office his documents towards the DS-2019 process. (3/29/2013). They were submitted to the Stanford campus Bechtel international center 4/4/2013. We await campus to create the DS-2019 documents(s). Once they are ready, we will pick up and send to Raja. Typical turnaround is a few days (< 2 weeks).

Abdullah will be visiting Islamabad 

Potential projects

See list of Projects

PingER at SLAC

 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 is experimenting with using different alpha values as well as different target landmarks in Europe, America and Pakistan. So far the results of using a constant alpha value and variable alpha values based on RTT are quite similar. I am trying to find the conditions and situations under which using variable alpha values is better. (3/20/2013).

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. Did you get an answer?

Future meeting  - Les

Next meeting Wednesday 10  April 2013 8:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday 11 April 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday 11 April 2013 11:00 am Malaysian time.

There is a doodle poll at http://doodle.com/fnwzs5yu7fmux86. Note that the Doodle poll times are GMT (e.g. 3am 11 April GMT = 8pm 10 April PDT, = 11am 11 April Malaysia time, = 8am 11 April Pakistan time)

Coordinates: