Introduction

Currently, the gathering of data from the MAs is initiated by the SLAC end.

Possible solution

Initially, this is proposed for the Beijing MA.

Since we cannot initiate the gathering from SLAC, a possibility might be to use the anonymous ftp service at SLAC (see https://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/ftp.html).

1. In this case, the MA (e.g. a script initiated at the Beijing MA and run at Beijing by say user Ann who does not have an account at SLAC) would daily run a script (as a cronjob) to use the incoming anonymous FTP at SLAC to store the day's data at SLAC. 

  1. At most (with the exception of SLAC) MAs, the data is stored in /usr/local/share/pinger/data, e.g.

    file: /usr/local/share/pinger/data found on dxmon3.cern.ch 
    total 66756
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12244303 Jun  7 18:56 ping-2018-06.txt
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 56049692 Jun  1 01:55 ping-2018-05.txt
  2. The data from the MA is compressed and copied to a directory associated with the MA  and read-write permissions set for group sf, e.g.

    169cottrell@pinger:~$ls -l /afs/slac/public/incoming/saqibali
    total 23277
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 saqibali sf  9360738 Jun  6 20:20 ping-2018-04.txt.gz
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 saqibali sf 12394002 Jun  6 20:20 ping-2018-05.txt.gz
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 saqibali sf  2079565 Jun  6 20:01 ping-2018-06.txt.gz

2. Then it would be necessary for the user with a SLAC account (e.g. saqibali) to move the data from the anonymous FTP to:

/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/hep/data/<host>/ping-<YYYY>-<MM>-<DD>.txt.gz
e.g.
/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/hep/data/pinger.slac.stanford.edu/ping-2018-06-04.txt.gz
/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/hep/data/pingergzhu.edu.cn/ping-2018-06-04.txt.gz

Automating

Then we need to automate the steps with synchronized cronjobs, one at Beijing to do the compression and anonymous ftp of  the recent data from the Beijing MA to the incoming ftp server at SLAC. Then one at SLAC to run at a suitable later time (when the ftp has completed) to copy the data from /afs/slac/public/incoming/saqibali to /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/hep/data/pinger6.beijing.cn/. This in turn has to be synchronized with so it is completed before the analysis of the hourly data by wrap-analyze-all, that currently runs as a cron job at 11 minutes past 1am each morning (this time can be changed)

11 1 * * * /usr/local/bin/bsub -W 180 -o /dev/null -q long /afs/slac/package/pinger/analysis/wrap-analyze-allmonths.pl --basedir /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger --usemetric --dataset hep  2>&1 #Takes ~ 2hr 15 min on pinger 11/11/2012.

 

See https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+data+flow+at+SLAC for the data flow. It might be possible to modify the current gathering script (getdata.pl) to add step 2 support (i.e. gather the data from anonymous ftp that is basically acting as a proxy). This would be done via a script run at SLAC under a SLAC account (e.g. saqibali). This might be interesting since it also could be extended and a step to providing support for the Android PingER project at Amity in Delhi, India which also needs a proxy.

This would need to be automated by cron scripts.