Minutes for SLAC-SEECS Meeting November 16, 2011.

General

Ghulam was unable to attend the meeting. Bilal will ask him to update SLAC team about the tasks mentioned below in Ghulam section before the next meeting.

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 needs to be able to logon to SLAC to assist Sadia. She has sent him mail Nov 3, and a reminder 11/16. The training still shows as not done. Bilal will complete the cyber training again and send the results to Sadia and Accounts department today.

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. Is there any interest?

ICFA and HEC Report

Amber has started working on ICFA annual report.

Tables and graphs need to be remade for Report of September . Discuss.

PingER Explorer

• Amber has put together an email list of PingER contacts to send the video to. We will send email about Explorer to the list.

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts

As updated on 11/16/2011.

Responsible person: Joun Muhammad

Security problems with a few PoP nodes, so now security steps will be implemented 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. I can see PoP nodes down.

PingER Management

Amber is managing PingER Nodes in readdressing or disabling the down ones (for > 90 days) and finding new hosts (using HostSearcher.pl) in the countries with <= 3 hosts. Update?

PingER traceroute archive site

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

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

• We need to see how the new pingtable.pl works. We had  a list of questions:
  • Ensure the script uses strict and -w (The script does not use strict and -w).
    • Sadia has fixed the new pingtable for -w and strict. This was sent to Ghulam so he could make the changes at SEECS and make it work again.
  • Sort the table by default according to monitor (primary sort) and remote host (secondary) . 
    • Ghualm needs to look at the SLAC pintable.pl to see how to do teh sort. Sadia has sent Ghulam the SLAC pingtable.pl.
  • It only shows data for Oct 9 & 10.  Ghulam was working on 2 weeks ago, we have heard nothing since
  • The RTTs differ markedly from those shown at SLAC. Ghulam was working on this 2 weeks ago, again we need to hear from him
  • Hourly gives Internal server error, daily and monthly appear to work. (Display the error message as data not fetched) Update?
  • 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.) We aksed for an update at our meeting November 2nd, we have not heard anything.
  • There was an error in the SLAC analyze-hourly.pl using quiesence instead of zero_packet_loss_frequency, was this spotted and fixed. This was fixed at SLAC.  Has it been fixed at SEECS
• Next steps for new pingtable.pl:
  • clean up SEECS version (strict & -w),  - Ghulam with help from Sadia
  • get the results to roughly agree with SLAC, - Ghulam
  • migrate the data from flat files to the database, the pinger data has some anomalies and so will need careful filtering - Ghulam
  • port to SLAC
    • need working, clean (strict -w) new pingatble.pl at SEECS - Ghulam
    • working, clean (strict & -w) new getdata,pl at SEECS - Ghulam
    • understand the mysql schema - Sadia
    • create the mysql database at SLAC - sadia
    • port new getdata.pl to SLAC 
      • Ensure it has strict & -w (see above) - Ghulam with help from Sadia
      • It looks like there is a serious problem in that the SEECS getdata uses the threads::shared module and the SLAC version of perl (5.10.1) does not support threads. Due to problems encountered and incompatability issues this is not available at SLAC . Would it be possible to use Parallel::Loop? Or make it work with and without threads (see http://perldoc.perl.org/threads.html)  even though it takes longer to run without threads.
      • Temporarily modify SEECS getdata_db.pl to eliminate Statistics, and use threds on old version of perl at SLAC.
    • port new pingtable.pl to SLAC and test with new getdata_db.pl
    • Migrate old flat file data to database
      • Since the pinger data has many anomalies it will need some care filtering

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

CBG TULIP Integration -- FYP (Bilal)

• Bilal did some stress testing. The landmarks are 331 while the targets will be the ones generated by Sadia. He will compare the results with the 4 month old results with 59 hosts.
• Some further requirements are:
  • Table needs to be extended.
  • If u can put Min RTT and the nearest landmark.
  • Put summary of the statistics.
  • Sadia will check her code which creates the list of the targets that Bilal was calculating values for.
• Sadia has tulip-viz.cgi working at SLAC
  • The output is different.
  • Sadia has sent the two outputs to Bilal. She needs feedback from Bilal to understand or ignore the differences
  • Why terminal data is unable to be printed on webpage. Although files and directories are placed as  it is  told to be . Bilal have you gone through the CBG folder at SLAC?

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. Update?

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 23rd November at 8:00 pm in US and Thursday 24th November at 9:00am in Pakistan.