Agenda of SLAC SEECS Meeting April 24th, 2012

General

Amber and Sadia are back in Pakistan. Les was on on vacation in England from April 8th-22nd.

Anjum believes he will have a student to convert CBG from MatLab to Mathematica as their MS thesis

What are the next steps. There has been no progress in the last 2 weeks. What are Sadia and Ambers's plans.

Currently Sadia has no plans. Sadia is no longer affiliated with NUST. Sadia is working voluntarily with Bilal in order to complete the problem. There are 2 problems, one is the database. The other is TULIP. Sadia is unclear what she plans to do. She expects to be able to make a decision in a month or so. She is getting married.

Once the database is ready then Joun can move the data. Ghulam needs to interact with Zafar or Umar. Umar will contact Zafar and see if he can spare sometime. Sadia will work with Ghulam to document his questions on the schema so Umar can work with Zafar to provide feedback.

Maggie is not working due to no disk space. This might be a reason for trace routes not working. Any Progress?

Arshad is applying for his visa. Hopes to be here end May start June. Does Arshad need a new invitation? Anjum will ask Arshad.

Anjum has applied for an HEC grant, also trying NUST to partially fund. Do not see a student at SLAC for 6 months and this may be optimistic.

Amber will continue with SEECS for 4-6 months.

Bilal and Ghulam will be leaving this month or next month.

Anjum is looking for graduate students to overlap with Bilal and Ghulam.

IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam

Les has the passwords for monitor and the IPv6 host at SEECS. He has successfully logged on. When he tries to execute a traceroute to ipv6.google.com he gets:

Executing exec(traceroute6, -m 30 -q 3, 2404:6800:4009:800::1014, 140) traceroute to 2404:6800:4009:800::1014 (2404:6800:4009:800::1014), 30 hops max, 140 byte packets
1  2001:4538:101:3::14 (2001:4538:101:3::14)  3021.987 ms !H  3021.983 ms !H  3021.971 ms !H

Les is unclear if he should see an external (to SEECS) host and has sent email. He needs to retest, but has had no time.

PingER Updates

HEC Report - Anjum, Amber and Imdad

Anjum did not submit the full or summary HEC report this month. He will submit both reports next month, Amber and Imadullah will prepare

Pakistani Hosts

Three nodes had IP address fixed. HEC Islamabad, Multan, Fatima Jenna university in Rawalpindi (near old NIIT).

Amber will notify Joun of non working nodes.

FSBD POP have high unreachability values. which is not acceptable. They are looking into it. Backhaul network is currently leased from PTCL however in 3-4 months they will replace it with their own network. There would be no commercial traffic on it. As a result it is expected that RTT and losses will improve drastically. So next 6 months are important for observing the network performance.

PingER Archive Site - Ghulam

Current Schema : see [here|IEPM:Pinger+PerfSonar schema].

Sadia has partially implemented the new schema so now awaits finalization

Sadia is working on getdata.pl to shift the data from SLAC files to database.

Future concerns:(Will be considered once the performance of above monthly aggregated data is observed) We await a working version before this can start.

How to store raw data for one year
How should it be sharded
For how long data should be in database
Ghulam thinks it will speed up our work if we remove the unused columns (metrics) of raw data from the pingtable. Only those fields will be left that are in perfsonar.

TULIP - Bilal

Bilal reports problem with Reflex.cgi. The report is unclear. We need an example, is it a particular target, particular region. If Pakistan then the problem could be that the tier 0 landmark in Pakistan (comsats) is not working. This needs to be addressed at the Pakistan end. The Comsats IP address changed and this may be the problem.

Bilal will submit S Asia at next meeting.

Bilal knows how to access the database. He will fix the IP address for Comsats if need be. He can also look for a working landmark in Pakistan and enter it as a tier 0 landmark at SLAC

Bilal needs to add the number of landmarks in the region for his Excel Spreadsheest. This will be useful for his paper, i.e. reporting typical accuracy as a function of landmarks in region.

Another interesting study would be whether using different alphas (in distance[km]=alpha*min_RTT[ms]*100[km/ms]) based on the alphas found in PingER for the various regions (see for examplehttp://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl?file=alpha&by=by-node&size=100&tick=daily&year=2012&month=03&from=United+States&to=United+States&ex=none&only=all&dataset=new&percentage=any) provides much benefit compared to the single current value of alpha. To facilitate this we have added PingER groups for N.AMERICA, EUROPE, AUSTRALASIA, S.ASIA, S.AMERICA.

Bilal will be sending the tulip draft paper before he leaves the job

Bilal will rerun the stress testing of North America using new reflex. He has submitted it.

Bilal is writing a report with stress testing results of all of the regions. he will submit before he leaves the job.

Possible projects

There can be a paper about Pinger if we could just find the right conference. MCN, ICC and Globecomm do provide network monitoring topics. It could talk of the various metrics and their importance (in particular; MOS, Alpha, max RTT, min RTT), the lessons learnt from running such a worldwide infrastructure, the uses of the data etc.
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 can add the impact of changing alpha. We can also indicate the importance of landmark proximity.
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.
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

Next meeting on Tuesday 1st May, 2012 at 8:00 pm in US and Wednesday 2nd May, 2012 at 8:00am in Pakistan.