Time & date
Wednesday May 8 2013 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday May 9 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday May 9 2013 11:00am Malaysian time.
Attendees
Invitees: Anjum, Kashif, Johari*, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul, Hanan* Fidah, Saqib*, Les*, Raja*, Umar and Bebo-
* Confirmed attendance
- Unable to attend
Actual attendees: Johari, Hanan, Raja, Les
Action Items from last meeting
- Les needs an invitation and funding so he can get started on travel.
- Johari is waiting to hear from Nara on alternate funding for someone from NUST for the workshop. This is very important.
- Johari was to put together ideas for an MoU between UM, UTM and UNIMAS.
- Hanan, Johari and Abdullah report on meeting in KL May 3rd
- Badrul is putting together a funding proposal.
- The traceroute at UNIMAS needs further investigation - Johari
- Saqib needs to optimize his traceroute to reduce the time it takes.
- Saqib work with local system/network admins to find out why traceroute at UTM is so slow, it looks like the name server is very slow. Where is the nameserver?
- Installing PingER on 2nd Raspberry Pie - Johari.
- We look forward to Badrul's student's work on the Malaysian Internet case study, can this be used as the basis for a paper on "User experience of using the Internet from Malaysian Universities
- Raja press forward with visa etc.
Workshop
Johari suggested a signing ceremony at the workshop for an MoU between UM, UTM and UNIMAS. Johari will work on putting together ideas for an MoU. No progress 5/8/2013.
- The draft page for promoting the upcoming PingER Workshop in UM is available from http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/workshop.php. The objective of this page is as a medium for promoting the workshop. There is a pdf format of the call for participation available for download on the page. Since this is a draft version, Johari would appreciate any feedback or correction before we email this page around. Les has sent a suggestion.
- Johari has created a list of invitees and will send to Abdullah and Hanan.
- The brochure is done. There will be a call for participation
- The dates for the workshop have been fixed as June Monday 24 - Tuesday 25 June.
- The schedule has now been fixed.
- The Logistics and Labs have been agreed on
- The afternoon session on the second day is still is in flux. Ideas include putting together basis for a research proposal, how to collaborate with the private sector (e.g. MIMOS and MYREN), Bebo is willing to give a presentation on modern web techniques.
UM will cover Les' travel and accomodation costs. Abdullah will send an invitation. Les will look at airline tickets this weekend. It is probably better if UM buys the tickets since there can be long delays in refunding*
Following the meeting it is planned for Les to spend a day (on the 26th) at UM making a presentation and talking with staff and students. Following this it is planned that Les visits UTM in Johor Baru and repeat the above.
Despite all efforts by Johari it does not appear we will be able to get funding to invite someone from NUST. There are two plans to cover this:
- Anjum record his session of PingER deployment in Pakistan and lessons learned. This is presented as a video + Skype attendance by Anjum for questions. An alternative might be for the slides to be shown with Anjum narating by phone or Skype.
- If the above does not work, then three talks:
- PingER in Malaysia initiative - Johari - 30 mins
- Case study of Internet connectivity within Malaysia together with anomalies - Badrul 30 minutes
- Routing within Malaysia - Saqib 30 mins
Invitations
University of Malaya will issue the invitation letter. Hanan had a meeting with Dr Abdullah and Johari at UM on the upcoming workshop on May 3rd to settle the invitation list.
For attendees it is important to try and get 2 representatives from each of the 20 public Malaysian universities. It would also be good to get a non MYREN University and someone from Malaysia Telecom. Bebo has sent contacts for MIMOS and Manipal. One participant would be from the computer division (more to do with installing and maintaining), the other from Faculty (more for the research side). Johari said there is space for 30. Anjum said we should invite more than 30 since there will be some who will not attend. We could go >30 people for the non technical sessions and restrict for the hands on.
Finding sites to monitor
It is not easy to find pingable sites in some Malaysian states. Obvious targets are universities, for example UUM in Kedah and UNIMAP in Perlis, but those sites are not ping-able. Also some of the existing hosts are not at the Universities we thought them to be at. An approach is to invite such sites to the workshop and explain to them what we are doing. Johari is using HostSearcher.pl to look for hosts. Badrul is also looking. There are plenty in KL and Penang but elsewhere it becomes hard to find suitable hosts.
Funding/Proposals
Johari reported that the FRGS proposal had been accepted. It is for 75K MRs (~$35K). It is for 5 people. It is not available until June and so cannot be used for the Workshop.
Badrul is putting together a proposal fro an outreach program. It is similar to Johari's FRGS proposal. It will be used to expand the monitoring hosts. There is no progress (4/24/2013), Badrul is looking for another collaborator besides UNIMAS.
Johari said a second round has been opened up for FRGS funding. Johari will share thsi with others at the meeting in KL in May. If a proposal is put together from multi-universities (e.g. 2 from each of UM, UTM and UNIMAS) then the acceptance probability is high. Also includes SLAC and NUST.
The Next step in funding is to go for bigger research funding, such as LRGS or eScience. Such proposals must lead to publications in high quality journals. They will need an infrastructure such as the one we are building. We can use the upcoming workshop (1 specific session) to brainstorm and come up with such proposal. We need to do some groundwork before that as well. Johari will take the lead in putting together 1/2 page descriptions of the potential research projects.
- Need to identify a few key areas of research related to PingER Malaysia Initiative and this can be shared/publicized through the website. These might include using the infrastructure and data for: anomaly detection; correlation of performance across multiple routes; and for GeoLocation. Future projects as Les listed in Confluence here https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects can also be a good start and also Bebo's suggestion.
- Need to synchronize and share research proposals so as not to duplicate research works. how to share? Maybe not through the website, or maybe can create a member only section of the website to share sensitive data such as research proposal?
Anjum mentioned a paper on Evaluation of IP Geolocation Algorithms on PingER and PlanetLab Infrastructures, by Fida Gilani et. al. submitted to IEEE INFOCOM 2011. This could be updated with new data and maybe submitted to a different venue. Anjum forwarded a copy of the paper to Johari, Abdullah and Hanan with copies to the team. The idea is to see whether there is interest at UTM, UM or UNIMAS.
Anjum suggested Saqib, Badrul and Johari put together a paper on user experiences with using the Internet in Malaysia as seen from Malaysian universities. In particular round trip time, losses, jitter, reliability, routing/peering, in particular anomalies, and the impact on VoIP, throughput etc. It would be good to engage someone from MYREN.
UNIMAS
There is a problem with the UNIMAS traceroute. It appears both in pinger.unimas.my and in the Raspberry. It appears pinger.unimas.my is behind a NAT that is not passing the traceroute UDP probes. Other hosts at UNIMAS are not seeing the problem, so Johari believes it may have to do with the IPTABLES in pinger.unimas.my. Traceroute using the -I option (send the probes using ICMP rather than UDP) seems to work (but needs root access). Thus it would appear not to be in the return (ICMP "time exceeded") response. The probes (when not using the -I option are UDP packets using sequentially ports 33434 - 33465 for up to 30 hops). It is possible that ports > some number may be blocked. Johari talked to Imran of the UNIMAS Computation Center to discuss the IP address configuration mismatch on private and public addresses. No progress 4/24/2013.
Johari has another Raspberry Pie. He has installed the PingER monitoring. He is seeing the same traceroute behavior.
UNIMAS has synchronized their list of Malaysian hosts with UM and UTM, however some are still missing. Les has sent a list to Johari
UTM
Saqib is starting to look at Pingtable.pl anomalies as a start in a case study for Malaysia and S.E Asia.
Les modified traceroute.pl to enable entering of extra options. This is so Saqib can hand tune his traceroute.pl to execute more quickly (e.g. by only starting at the 6th hop, using parallel queries etc.). Saqib has installed the new traceroute and is testing. Try http://pinger.fsksm.utm.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?function=traceroute&target=www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu&options=-f%206%20-w%203%20-m%2022
Saqib contacted his network people to understand why the DNS resolution is so slow (10-15 secs each). Turns out there are 2 DNS servers at UTM. However one is down. this may cause timeout delays of the name resolution trys the down DNS server first. Saqib has disabled he donw DNS server in the search order and hopes to test today to see if that fixes the traceroute delays.
There is also a problem of the traceroute from UTM to UM going via Europe. Badrul has contacts at MYREN and will use them to investigate the routing and where some of the routers are actually located.
UM
Badrul has been looking at anomalies in ping measurements. In particular hosts which are unreliable, hosts with large (>1) values of Directivity, host with large RTTs, hosts with altage unreachability or losses etc. Badrul spotted that MOS was not working for the UM monitor. Turned out he had an older version of PingER2. He upgraded and all appears well. Les has updated the web site for downloading pinger from to add the later version of pinger2.pl. Les has maded copies of the analysis script available ro Badrul since he wants to see how the various metrics are calculated.
NUST
Multan POP has been added to the list of Beacons at Kashif's request. Raja is hoping to get his visa in a couple of weeks. If it takes longer he may need a new DS2019.
PingER at SLAC
Les gave an invited general colloquiam at SLAC on May 6th on the "Emergence of the Internet and Africa" . It included some PingER case studies and measurements.
Several fixes and enhancements have been made to: table.pl to provide sorting (ascending & descending) by column, to make the download feature work, to provide a link to information on the hosts, and to enable selection of Malaysia for the source and or destination. There is a new version of traceroute.pl that enables the user to directly enter traceroute options.
Les has provided several of the PingER analysis scripts to Badrul to assist him in seeing how the various metrics are calculated.
TULIP
Unfortunately the UPS on Raja's machine ran out before the end of the meeting. Raja provided an update by email. Raja has mostly been working on Mathematica during the past weeks. Unlike MATLAB, Mathematica doesn't have as many builtin fuctions for spherical geometry calculations due to which I had to write those functions myself.
After completing the code he will verify it for different cases and then work on calling it on runtime (when on server)
He tried to get traceroutes from landmarks in India to landmarks in Pakistan using traceroute.pl but none of them responded. I will try to do this for other regions and see how that goes
Potential projects
Future meeting - Les
Next meeting Wednesday 22nd May 2013 8:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, Thursday 23rd May 2013 8:00am Pakistan time, Thursday 23rd May 2013 11:00 am Malaysian time.