Agenda for SEECS/SLAC meeting April 27, 2011.

Bold face, topics for coming meeting that we need to address

Future

• Sadia & Amber: arrived. Currently staying with Les and Barbara. Hopefully will shift into the apartment by May 1st. Both have started work. Sadia needs to explore PerfSONAR and PingER for the middleware (DAO, PSI), while Amber needs to work on PingER. Sadia is also working on affinity groups. She is currently adding the ability to delete groups.
• SVN possibilities? Umar set one at SEECS on maggie server. Sadia and Zafar will be working on PerfSONAR so it makes sense to use an SVN. Zafar needs to explore. This is just an idea and is not necessary if it proves to be a hindrance in usual work.

Pakistani case study - Zafar, Anjum

1. Arshad reported that the 5 new hosts were sent to five different PERN PoPs on Friday evening, last week.

   TCS Details (02 boxes each): ------------------------------------------ 1) Jamshoro Mr. Abdul Samad TCS No:500-00170225 By Air 2) Faislabad Mr. Ahsan Raza TCS No:905-1613400 By Road 3) Multan Mr. Raheel Raza TCS No:905-1629701 By Road 4) Karachi Mr. Naeem Ahmed TCS No:905-1629702 By Road 5) Quetta Mr. Rehan Sarwar TCS No:905-1629703 By Road

    27 more hosts are yet to be deployed.
2. Probably the dissolution of HEC will not take place. Supreme Court of Pakistan has taken action against dissolution. We will have a clearer picture after a week of impacts. Updates?
3. Has anyone at PERN been approached about giving someone from HEC the responsibility for ongoing support. Concern will be that once the nodes are deployed, we will have all the latest patches but since these nodes will be on internal network and it could be a potential security hazard once security is breached. Umar suggests that we should get this in writing from HEC that they'll be responsible for these nodes on their POPs. This is probably in the noise compared to the HEC problem. Anjum will send email to Anwar Amjad or one of his lieutenants  to ID someone to manage the nodes.
4. Putting monitoring hosts on UPS. Anjum is following on this with PERN.
5. Separate the analysis presentation of the PERN from non PERN connected nodes. Les emailed some information on how to do this using affinity groups. Sadia was working on this. No progress since 3/30/2011.
6. PERN wants MOS further broken down by PERN and non PERN. Anwar Amjad wants an inter-city analysis. VoIP calls are relatively bad for inter-city links within Pakistan as compared to VoIP calls made outside of Pakistan (such as USA). Anwar Amjad is most interested in Islamabad to Quetta, Islamabad to Karachi and Islamabad to Lahore links. Umar mentions that it is completely fine doing this but asks whether HEC can provide us with statistics. Anjum says HEC is using fluke for measurements and they will share their data.

Latest PERN network map

Anjum got latest PERN map. Notes from Anjum: The provided map is better than the existing one but its still not complete in information and not immediately useable for our purposes. Any update - Anjum?

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts

Responsible people:

• Muhammad Talal Hussain
• Joun Muhammad

PingER

• Google spreadsheets may be used to reduce friction in information gathering process for new hosts. Faisal.
• The Sarawak host is now working both on PingER and traceroute.
• Sadia was working on adding alpha to prm.pl, she was going to use nodes.pl to get information on the Lat/Longs. It is still giving huge values for alpha. She will look at. It can be found at s_prm.pl
• Amber is updating the Beacons.
• Pending until Sadia arrives here (to be discussed alongside PSI stuff):** You should compare your schema with the one used by perfSONAR for PingER. Faisal will provide Zafar with the perfSONAR schema for PingER and Zafar will compare the perfSONAR schema for pinger with his.
• PingER Map (Feature Requests)** Assuming it is easy do not remove a box if one clicks on something else, leave that to be done manually by clicking on the x in the top RH corner** Add auto ranging** Make it less browser dependent** Default is NoClear

PingER archive site -- FYP (Ghulam and Farhan)

• Revised the schema according to Umar's recommendations.
• Change in Nodes table of archive site database schema - included all information of nodes.cf file in Nodes table.
• Information of nodes comes in this table through NODEDETAILS table at SLAC.
• Data from NODEDETAILS table is collected by a script node.pl and we changed this script to store data in Nodes table instead of nodes.cf file.
• getdata.pl script has been changed to collect data from monitoring nodes and store it in to Ping_data table of archive site database instead of files.
• Changed getdata.pl script to collect nodes data from Nodes table instead of nodes.cf file because it will not be used in new architecture. The fields where sequence number or rtt is not present, NULL is used.
• Main analysis script is analyze-hourly.pl which executes daily on archive site and does analysis. This script has also been changed to get input for analysis from ping_data table instead of files. Tested and optimized.
• Other scripts analyze-daily.pl, analyze-monthly.pl, analyze-allmonths.pl, analyze-allyears.pl will be changed to get nodes information from nodes table instead of nodes.cf file. Remember these scripts are using the same data that analyze-hourly.pl is inserting into the analysis table.

Adding MOS and Alpha to pingtable.pl

• Analysis scripts to add Mean Opinion Score and Alpha, some things need to be correctly configured. It has been deployed at http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl for testing.
• MOS shouldn't be below 1, investigate 0.000 values for both MOS and Alpha. Solved. Problem arose in analyze-daily script when distance between two hosts was 0. Solved by catering for this issue in the analyze-daily script.
  • Once the code is in stable state and is legibly written we will be able to take the step forward to deploy it to SLAC.
• Extra credit .. Dr. Anjum.

PingER traceroute archive site

See http://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/traceroutearchive.cgi .. some improvements:

• Choose hosts without worrying about the date.
• Latest successful traceroute shown from A to B (left hand box) and B to A (right hand box).
• Changes (from A to B and B to A) also shown since a past successful traceroute (diff between the latest traceroute and the one half way since inception time (i.e. since April 1, 2011).
• Some sites might not be working due to PERN proxy policy. Sites that are on PERN network do not allow connections outside the 111.68.y.z IP domain. Some are just simply unavailable.

TULIP

• With the move to the new host Faisal had to get a new cookie to allow scriptroute to run scripts on the PlanetLab infrastructure. Still needs testing.

CBG TULIP Integration -- FYP (Bilal)

• TULIP setup on maggie2 server and CBG is running on PERN machine.
• CBG is modified to talk to TULIP. 
• TULIP is modified for integration.
• Details of integration are here.
  • TULIP code was not running due to the machine sitting behind a proxy and unavailability of a live IP. Bilal used his home system to configure this and it worked. Replicated this to the maggie2 server. This has NAT routing and proxy policy issues. NUST HQ is dubious about external TCP traffic and thus blocks this traffic. NUST HQ is being contacted to resolve or allow traffic from reflector @ SLAC.
  • Latest update: Bilal is using the PERN machine (same machine being used for PerfSONAR deployment) which is on a Micronet connection for deploying CBG (Matlab code). The problem he is now facing has to do with the physical link connecting the PERN machine. A network engineer found that 50% of the packets are lost over the link and those that are not have a higher RTT (?~50ms). Micronet was contacted and they have advised to check the physical link.

IPv6 activities at NUST SEECS, Pakistan

PingER2 works with IPv6, could start taking data and see what breaks. Here is the list of activities we have been doing at the moment:

• Training and Awareness: We have conducted a workshop and a seminar on IPv6. Another Seminar is planned in the coming weeks.
• Collaborations: We have created a tunnel with cybernet (local ISP) for global IPv6 connectivity. We have been allocated public IPv6 addresses by PSEB for R & D usage.
• Implementation: We are currently working for participation in world IPv6 day. Some of the services that we are currently working on are Webserver, DNS and local connectivity of IPv6 for SEECS users. We are short of dedicated hardware for this part and for this our proposal is under review. We hope to have full range of hardware covered once it is approved.
• Research: We have a team of 3-4 people working on Transition Mechanisms. Open source implementation of these mechanisms. Mobility Extensions. LISP for IPv6. Hands on implementation on NS2, GNS3.

PerfSONAR (Pakistan)

• PerfSONAR at SEECS: Problems were fixed. NTP servers were causing considerable clock delay. Added close-by Stratum 1 NTP servers to solve the problem. Nodes were updated to PerfSONAR version 3.2 (Fedora distro). Nodes however are offline since they were disrupting normal traffic. We are waiting for 10 Mbps dedicated connection to switch the nodes back on. We have a 1 Mbps link for PerfSONAR (on temporary purposes). NUST is purchasing a 2 Mbps dedicated link from WorldCall. No progress yet .. routing issues are showing live IPs as inaccessible.
• PERN will deploy perfSONAR at HEC/Quetta. Someone is working on this. The university is close by HEC/Quetta. Hope in 4 weeks to have PingER monitoring node in 4 universities in the Quetta region.

PerfSONAR (USA)

1. Faisal is working with Yee. Moving XML responses to json arrays (parsing). Done.
2. A Datagrid module to display tests from all the result set hosts for a selected.

1. Ability for datagrid module to share data and calls with map.## Documentation available here ## [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Google+Maps+for+PerfSONAR]

1. Zafar is working on making SNMP-MA remote-connection-capable. It will provide the ability to read RRDs over the network instead of having the RRDs on the same machine as the RRD client.

Possible projects

• See [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects]. Zafar will talk to the students about these projects.
• Extend the NODEDETAILS data base to allow entry support for whether the host is currenty pingable. 
• Extend Checkdata to provide emails automatically, see [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Extend+checkdata+to+make+it+more+useful]. Many of the ideas in the script node-contacts.pl are a step in this direction.
• Improve the PingER2 installation procedures to make it more robust. This might be something for the person(s) in Pakistan who are responsible for installing PingER2 at the Pakistani monitoring sites. They probably have found where the failures occurs. Also look at the FAQ, and ping_data.pl which has been improved to assist in debugging, could it be further improved (e.g. provide access to the httpd.conf file so one can see if it properly configured)? There are 2 students working on the PingER archive. *Is this something they could work on?*
•  [Fix PingER archiving/analysis package to be IPv6 conformant|IEPM:Make PingER IPV6 compliant]. Will build a proposal for an IPv6 testbed. They will try various transition techniques. A proposal has been prepared and that has been submitted to PTA. Adnan is a co PI. It is being evaluated today.  A small testbed has been established in SEECS and the plan to shift some of the network to IPv6. Bilal is part of 3 students involved with PingER and they will be involved with IPv6. They are porting the PingER archive site site to using a database. They have redeveloped the archive site using Umar's documentation. They have set up a small test archive site. They have gathering, archiving, analysis. They will design a new database. They will also try a port of PingER to IPv6. 
• Look at RRD event detection based on thresholds and how to extend, maybe adding plateau algorithm. Umar's algorithm did  not work in a predictable manner. 
• Provide near realtime plots of current pinger data using getdata_all.pl/wget. It will work as a CGI script with a form to select the host, the ping size, and the time frame to plot. It will use wget or getdata_all.pl to get the relevant data and possibly RRD/smokeping to display the data. Adnan thinks one of the students working on the archive site may take this on
• Provide better support for affinity groups.

Paper - Umar, Fida

• SVN for paper, Umar has set it up and it is working. Umar will send out the accounts. Not critical at the moment.
• Umar will take as the main/first author of the paper. Ali Khayam has put together an introduction
• identifying the main points. Umar will send in the first draft and put together with feedback from Ali. Umar hopes to be done by Mid December. Umar is currently overwhelmed. Zero progress 11/10/2011. Umar has to submit a camera ready copy in the next couple of days.
• Adnan is also interested in working on the paper and will talk to Umar.
• Umar sent draft to Adnan. Umar will be in Pakistan later this month and will get together with Adnan. Fida will be available after December 16th.
• Fida will send review comment to Adnan
• Meeting between Adnan, Umar, Ali Khayam did not come to pass due to Adnan being sick. It is believed we need a re-write, the technical details are OK. Adnan will get to more rigorously. 

Future meeting time - Les

The next meeting in Wednesday, May ##, 2011 (8 pm) for people in US and Thursday, May ##, 2011 (8 am) for people in Pakistan.