Minutes for SLAC-SEECS Meeting November 02, 2011.

General

Bilal's account at SLAC has been disabled since he has not completed his cybersecurity training. It will be re-enabled after this is done. He has gone through the cyber training however he is unable to log on to pinger. Sadia will check this with accounts department tomorrow.

IP address has been assigned to IPV6 but machine has yet not been set up. IP will be active after 10th September. Not active yet.

IPv6 things are still unclear at SLAC. I have an account on a dual stack host in Italy. A possible project would be to make traceroute.pl work on a dual stack IPv6 host (say to traceroute to ipv6.google.com). Will need to look at gethostbyname etc. 

Future & Publicity

• Amber has put together an email list of PingER contacts to send the video to.
• We need to add some populations (e.g. US) Internet users and Internet penetration figures (they are missing for many countries). Once this is done we can announce
• Explorer
  • Public Data Explorer next Gen Motioncharts is working, HDI, IDI, Internet Penetration, CPI and DOI are all added.
  • Amber is developing a new webpage for explorer which is available here.
  • Feature for selecting a specific region to observe its performance in explorer has been added. See
  • Documentation of Pinger Data Explorer is available.

Pakistani case study - Amber, Anjum

1. Host count has reached 56 in Pakistan.
2. HEC report for September is sent. Any further requirements? 

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts

As updated on 11/01/2011.

Responsible person: Joun Muhammad

Security problems with a few PoP nodes, so now we are going to implement security steps on these nodes. Or else SEECS will be reinstalling the nodes. So it is expected that the nodes may be down for next two-three weeks.

PingER Management

Amber is managing PingER Nodes in readdressing or disabling the down ones (for > 120 days) and finding new hosts (using HostSearcher.pl) in the countries with <= 3 hosts*.* Done.

Difference in Ping and TCP synack respose times

Sadia has made some measurements, analyzed the results and is/has putting/put together a report. Read here .

PingER traceroute archive site

Ghulam will send the list of monitoring nodes that are down.

PingER archive site - FYP (Ghulam, Farhan, Zafar)

• The archive site based on relational database is completed and is ready to be deployed on the server.
• We need to see how the new pingtable.pl works. We have looked at via VNCviewer. Amber has sent a list of questions:
  • TSV file does not work. (Amber has explained Ghulam how to save data as TSV file.)
  • Ensure the script uses strict and -w (The script uses strict and -w)
  • Sort the table by default according to monitor (primary sort) and remote host (secondary) . Will do.
  • It only shows data for Oct 9 & 10.
  • The RTTs differ markedly from those shown at SLAC.
  • Hourly gives Internal server error, daily and monthly appear to work. (Display the error message as data not fetched )
  • Does the new pingtable and the archive site check for valid IPv4 and IPv6 addresses? (Currently it works on IPV4 however, Ghulam will ask Kashif Sattar to help him deal with IPV6 people.)
  • There was an error in the SLAC analyze-hourly.pl using quiesence instead of zero_packet_loss_frequency, was this spotted and fixed.
  • Ghulam will send a copy of the new pingtable.pl to review it for quality/maintainability of the code.
• Next step is to port to SLAC. What about older data?
• Ghulam has sent Sadia archive implementation report today.
• I looked in the PingER Confluence wiki but could not find the report. they need to be accessible online.
• Ghulam needs to have a discussion with Zafar about analyzing the new archive site with respect to cpu cycles and memory.

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 athttp://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl for testing.
• Alpha and MOS to be implemented at SLAC site. Sadia will be doing this with the help of Zafar. Currently Ghulam and Farhan are working on synchronizing the SLAC and SEECS scripts.

TULIP

Zafar, Sadia, Bilal and Ghulam had a meeting regarding understanding TULIP on Saturday 24th September.TULIP and analysis archive progress was discussed too .

Sadia and Bilal will be testing tulip on Monday.

CBG TULIP Integration -- FYP (Bilal)

• Bilal will have a stress testing before deploying it on SLAC. He will run the script for 310 hosts now and then compare it with the results he saved 4 months ago with 59 hosts. Update?
• Matlab licence is going to be upgraded from standalone to network. We need to understand how to access MatLab from Tulip. We have a MatLab license. Can we use a Matlab script etc. Sadia?
• Integration will be done in two or three days.
• Sadia and Bilal will figure it out how to display the results.

PerfSONAR (Pakistan)

• PerfSONAR at SEECS: PerfSONAR throughput and latency nodes are now up and running at SEECS. Hostnames and corresponding IP adresses are:**  throughput measurement node: http://psbw.seecs.edu.pk/ (http:115.186.132.154/toolkit/) 
  • latency measurement node: http://psla.seecs.edu.pk/ (http://115.186.132.155/toolkit/)
• Select options under "Service Graphs" to view throughput or latency graphs. Added 5 Stratum 1 NTP servers to cater for clock delay and everything seems to work fine.
• There are some interesting one-way latency graphs at 115.186.132.155 (SEECS PerfSONAR Latency node). Dst to Src (e.g MIT to SEECS) latency is less than Src to Dst (e.g SEECS to MIT) latency. This might uncover some trends in outbound network traffic from Pakistan.
• Bilal and Ghulam will have a meeting with Zafar to know about PerfSonar and to maintain it in future.

Possible projects

• There can be a paper kind of talking on Pinger if we could just find the right conference. MCN, ICC and Globecomm do provide network monitoring topics. We can talk of GEO-Location experiences. For example within Pakistan it works fine, however as we go within regions or continents this gets worse. We can publish some stats on that for example. We are yet not ready for Tulip paper.
• See [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+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. 

Future meeting time - Les

1. Next meeting on Wednesday 16th November at 8:00 pm in US and Thursday 17th November at 9:00am in Pakistan.