Quarterly Report on Research Activities
4Q 2003 (October - December)
~ Continuing development of new metrics and real-time analysis for PMA
Coding work continued on the flow engine. Support was added for direct Dag access via dagapi to the library being used for trace handling. This will need to be tested with a Dag monitor. This is an important prerequisite for any real-time application.
For the histogram sequence tool, a mechanism to store and replay the sequences was implemented. This will help with the analysis of larger trace files.
More development of the real-time sensor using the MAX GigaPop machine (OC48 one direction), refining the code to use better pointer management and dynamic memory a bit better. In response to the feedback received from the PAM2004 reviewers, additional work reflecting the comments was performed on the sensor.
Two abstracts on our real-time efforts were submitted to PAM2004:
A Real-Time Packet Burst Metric.
Design and Implementation of a Scalable Real-Time Network Sensor.
Plans were finalized for Pere Barlet of UPC Barcelona to travel to Hamilton (NZ) in early January to work with PMA Project lead Joerg Micheel for two months on various real-time analysis work. They laid out a plan for the period he is going to be there, as follows.
Port SMARTxAC to other link layer technologies, OC3c/OC12c/OC48c ATM/PoS
Run performance tests at various link speeds, with different test patterns, assess the real-time performance
Develop a version which will display anonymized data, general use
Make SMARTxAC run on NLANR PMA monitors for display on the Web, starting, perhaps, with the MAX OC48MON.
~ Special Traces
The University of Auckland is now instrumented with a DAG3.5E; another long trace file was taken. Data collected is between 100MB/hour (night) and 500MB/hour (day), both directions. Work is in progress on getting the data off the monitor once we are finished capturing, copying over the Internet is believed not to be a good option. The Auckland-8 data set seems like a success, it ran for 14 days contiguously. We have started postprocessing the trace, and managed to get the file size down to 55%, which looks like the entire data set will be somewhere around 40GB compressed. It is really showing that the PC itself is five years old, it takes about 3 times longer to anonymize and recompress the data then to scp transfer from Auckland to San Diego. Continued the postprocessing and the copy process to pma.nlanr.net, as well as archival to the HPSS. We are done with about 14GByte, or one third, of the overall data set. ftp://pma.nlanr.net/traces/long/auck/8/
A number of systems became active lately, including FRG (Front Range GigaPOP) and NCG (new NCAR Gigabit tap). Both are collecting data now. NCG is particularly busy, so the opportunity was taken to collect a long data set at the site, for one hour, 7GBytes, uncompressed. NCG is connected to a SPAN port (we had a look at the data) and hence the timestamps might be distorted and some data could get lost on the switch before reaching the monitor. It would be preferable if we had a direct link tap (we probably sent splitters with the box) but are reluctant to trade a working monitor against the uncertainty of making the link tap work. ftp://pma.nlanr.net/traces/long/ncar/1
We are in the process of retrieving the Leipzig-II data set which was collected by Klaus Mochalski some time ago. This data set is of interest as it is a two-point measurement at a university access link, thus comparable to Auckland-6, but with very different physical link settings and traffic characteristics. ftp://pma.nlanr.net/traces/long/leip/2/
~ New (and developing) strategically important passive measurement deployments
OC192 ~ We overcame a number of significant technical and other issues and presented a working 10GigEmon in the SCinet NOC at SC2003. After which, the machine was returned to SDSC. Current work involves investigating and resolving problems with the payload content and finding a configuration which works for a pair of cards in a system. When these issues are resolved, we will begin preparations for an OC192c instrumentation on the Abilene backbone. Many thanks to Stephen Donnelly of Endace, with whom we have worked closely, especially regarding the Dag6 (OC192/10Gig) measurement cards. An additional SCSI disk storage was ordered for the OC192a machine, which will raise it from 130 GB to about 660 GB; should arrive early in the next period.
nai-p-i2a, Internet2 GigaPop in Ann Arbor, MI ~ a PMA monitor was shipped, installed, and deployed this period (after difficulties arising from shipping damage).
nai-p-psc, Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, Pittsburgh, PA ~ work began on preparing an OC48 machine for this site, it was completed and the machine was shipped this period. It is in good condition and should be installed soon. The optical splitter was received and the CDMA timing unit will be shipping shortly.
nai-p-sda ~ Progress was made on the development of GigE measurements on the passive monitor at SDSC. Since the loss of the connection to the Abilene network of nai-p-sda, we are pursuing the connection to the Abilene network through the CENIC network. NetOps notified us that the new regenerative tap for this link is active. Researched and purchased new server equipment and components for the machine. This Gigabit Ethernet monitor uses the Dag4.3GE cards from Endace and requires a system board with PCIX slots. After assembly of the machine and the installation of the four 80 GB SATA hard drives, it turns out the back plane controlling the drives is not functioning. We arranged with SuperMicro to ship out another.
The replacement machine for the Frontrange Gigapop also shipped this period .
The Ohio State site is switching to a GigE connection, which they are interested in monitoring. We are arranging to create another GigE monitor for that site.
~ Upgrades, troubleshooting, and maintenance on the PMA infrastructure
We obtained the new 120 GB disk needed to complete the disk chassis for the raid array on the PMA server (480GB total). It is now ready for the additional storage to be installed.
Additional hard drives and chassis were purchased from Dell to increase the storage for trace collection on the OC192A machine (the original machine we purchased about a year ago). Obtained were four 146 GB drive for a total of 584 GB, and after pulling them all together in a Raid0 it leaves an available capacity of 573390988 KB and a 110MB/s write, 124 read. Stephen Donnelly was a great help with this project.
For most of the long traces work, which involves UNIX terminal sessions running for days in a row, we have started using the screen(1) utility, so that sessions can be kept running for uninterrupted access. Turns out to be very useful, especially if there is an unexpected network hang; your foreground screen might disconnect from your ssh session on the server, while the actual session you care about keeps running uninterruptedly. Those situations created troubles in the past where the ADSL modem would pick up a different IP address every time the DSLAM got rebooted, thus ruining a good chunk of leg work, sometimes 2 or 3 times a day.
This was a productive time with PMA sites. A concerted effort was made during the quarter to revive a number of OC3MONs. Working with site technicians, TXS, APN and OSU were brought back online. PMA machines are often located in unattended sites. This makes it difficult to get assistance with the machine to make corrections. Site support people must travel from their normal locations to the unattended site. In one case, our support contact traveled approximately 100 miles.
In summary, the following PMA machines are fully operational and ready to collect traces:
nai-p-aix, Ames Internet Exchange, Moffett Field, CA
nai-p-anl, Argonne National Labs, Argonne, Ill
nai-p-apn, APAN HPC, Chicago, Ill
nai-p-bwy, Columbia U. New York, NY
nai-p-cos, Colorado State, Fort Collins, CO
nai-p-mem, U. of Memphis, Memphis, Tenn.
nai-p-mra, Merit Comm., U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
nai-p-nca, National Center for Atmospheric Research (OC3mon), Boulder, CO
nai-p-ncg, National Center for Atmospheric Research (GigE), Boulder, CO
nai-p-odu, Old Dominion U., Norfolk, VA
nai-p-osu, Ohio State U., Columbus, OH
nai-p-txg, Texas GigaPop, Texas A & M U., Houston, TX
nai-p-txs, Rice U., Houston, TX
nai-p-max, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads GigaPop, Washington, DC
nai-p-amp, AMPATH GigaPop, Miami, Fla.
nai-p-frg, Front Range GigaPop, Denver, CO
Serious issues regarding damage done during shipment of the passive monitors arose. We have been gluing parts into place as well as adding internal packing to the machines. However, more than one machine has arrived at its destination in poor condition, causing installation problems and the need to send replacement parts, this also inconveniences the site personnel to a large degree. We have now resolved to take this matter to Federal Express.
More detail on these activities can be found in the monthly reports for this reporting period, available at:
http://moat.nlanr.net/Reports/MNA/200310Oct.html
http://moat.nlanr.net/Reports/MNA/200311Nov.html
http://moat.nlanr.net/Reports/MNA/200312Dec.html
~ Reimplementation of AMP and development of a new testing architecture
Finished the rotation of the recovery files and use of multiple files (and associated testing). Worked on splitting the recovery file into a group of files and supporting rotation of the files when they reach a given size. That turned out to be a bit trickier than expected because of the possible need to cross file boundaries during recovery.
Finished the transfer of trace data code and the unit test for it.
Completed the command interface (without remote IO, which we will leave for a later release). Working on the command interface that allow tests that require a server to be run.
Completed the IPMP code, including the information exchange protocol. We then implemented arbitrary file transfer, from the AMPlets to the server. This is needed for some of the more complex tests which we are expecting to include in the second release.
Progress was made on putting pathchar (a bandwidth estimation tool) into the new AMP code.
Improved the mechanism that is used to terminate the transfer server and to check whether it is possible to restart the server (i.e., if the socket is free). This is done as part of the test suite and the new code speeds up the process quite a bit.
Read through the add_test file which is included with the amplet code. We worked to get the amplet code to compile. Had some issues with cross-platform compiling, but couple quick type casts took care of that problem.
Currently there are ~12500 lines of code.
While coding IPMP we wanted to check the checksum we were generating from a tcpdump trace and went looking for a tool that we could feed a string of hex from tcpdump into that would give us the checksum. We could not find one so we wrote one in Javascript. http://moat.nlanr.net/Software/HEC/index.html
~ IP Measurement Protocol (IPMP)
Development work continued on the cross-traffic-from-trace (ctft) generator. Performance limitations were corrected; it is now complete, subject to performance tests.
IPMP related experiments to be performed on the WAND emulation network were designed and carried out. These involved using a 10mbit link in the path immediately after a 100mbit link, using the IPMP packet tailgating method, and the ctft generator. The data is used to empirically show the difficulties of measuring the capacity of a link that is much faster than the link that fed it (e.g., going from a 10mbps link to a 100mbps link). Results were submitted to PAM2004: Segmentation of Internet Paths for Capacity Estimation. http://www.wand.net.nz/~mjl12/pam2004.pdf
While working on the IPMP Internet-Draft, a small change was made to the layout of the options field to make things more efficient The draft was completed and submitted to the IETF Internet-Drafts editor. We participated in an extended discussion of IPMP which took place on the IETF Internet Measurement Research Group's (IMRG) email list.
Tony McGregor met with the CEO of Allied Telesyn in NZ (they do the development work for their layer 3 devices here in NZ). He has agreed to revisit the idea of them implementing IPMP.
~ IPv6 and IPv6 Scamper
We started doing some analysis on the weekly Scamper traces that William Maton (Communications Research Center, NZ) is generating for us. http://www.wand.net.nz/~mjl12/ipv6-ryouko/
Thanks to the output from 20 Scamper runs by Michael Swoboda (RIPE NCC)- seems to be all the RIPE TTM boxes that are IPv6'd - we may now have the bulk of the European IPv6 Internet mapped.
amp-mtu's IPv6 feed was changed from a 6bone tunnel to native on Abilene; see image links below.
before: http://amp.nlanr.net/active/cgi-bin/v6_linkcomparison.cgi?from=amp-nysernet&to=amp-mtu&date=103.11.4
after: http://amp.nlanr.net/active/cgi-bin/v6_linkcomparison.cgi?from=amp-nysernet&to=amp-mtu&date=103.12.19
Path MTU discovery function (PMTU support) for Scamper ~ In response to community need for tools to collect statistics on paths that support a >1500 byte MTU, an investigation began on how to efficiently implement PMTU discovery in Scamper, for the purpose of finding tunnels. The original idea to keep a table of links does not seem as if it will work, as the same link may have different routes to it that will be revealed from the host running Scamper. A tree of the paths seen so far seems to be the best solution. Path MTU discovery was then implemented in Scamper. We have set out the data structures to be used, and written some code to select an appropriate initial MTU using the routing socket. Made excellent progress; it seems to be working pretty well, although some work is still remaining. Of interest, there are 9180 byte clean paths out of SDSC.
~ New Path Display tool - divide and conquer graphic (pathviz)
A new tool for Path Display is under development. The purpose is to display a path under investigation and the paths from other nearby monitors (in order to localize problem paths). We will be creating a program which will help locate and display blocks in the network with a graphic output showing the network topology and similarities in paths between AMP machines.
A test dataset from the AMP Web site was downloaded. Classes which handle the timestamp and data from the traceroute files were written and debugged. We modified the way files are read in so that now the process is much cleaner and can be used for any instances of file input needed in the program, except the machine list, which is a special case. Currently the code performs a basic comparison of the paths; continuing to work on debugging to get a textual output. Also installed the GD library and gave a bit of thought to the drawing output.
~ New (and developing) strategically important active measurement deployments
We deployed an AMP machine on the NaukaNet (amp-naukanetnwu) to test to a set of machines within Russia. Greg Cole (NaukaNet) arranged for these measurements to take place and he hopes this will be a stepping stone to a Russian AMP mesh (as do we).
We began a collaboration with Rick Summerhill, Matt Zekauskas, and other folks from Internet2 where the goal is to deploy AMP machines at the 11 Abilene backbone nodes as part of the Observatory Project. Some initial technical problems were resolved (such as the availability of -48 VDC sourced power supplies for the one rack unit [RU] AMP monitor chassis, power cable length, and monitor addressing from SDSC). The first AMP was installed at the Atlanta I2 GigaPop site - amp-i2at (Internet2, Atlanta) and began collecting data in November.
We are happy to report that the AMP monitor we configured and installed at the Supercomputing 2003 collected data all week (amp-sc03 (Supercomputing03). Thanks to Kevin Walsh and Matt Zekauskas for their help.
We shipped an AMP monitor to TANet2 in Taiwan at the end of the period.
The TransPAC connection is moving from the Pacific Northwest (PNW) GigaPop in Seattle to a location in the Los Angeles area. Our AMP monitor at the PNW GigaPop was on the TransPAC connection, therefore it must be moved, or associated with another network. Discussions regarding co-locating the AMP monitor at PNW GigaPop with ESNet began. We were asked to provide them with a realistic calculation of the inbound and outbound traffic load of an AMP monitor at a site. Our calculations indicate this to be less than 20 kilobits per second assuming a full mesh of 150 AMP sites and an average of 10 hops per path between sites. The plan regarding the new location for the TransPAC connection (Los Angeles area) is to communicate with John Hicks and install an additional AMPlet in Los Angeles to cover the TransPAC connection.
~ Upgrades, troubleshooting, and maintenance on the AMP infrastructure
Disk fill on the AMP and VOLT servers continues to accelerate as the steady growth in the number of AMP sites is causing the volume of data to grow proportionately. The time period before archiving is needed again is considerably less than in the past. Currently, it is needed on both servers at a frequency of about five weeks maximum to avoid the point when the am_slave process failure occurs (at approximately ninety-one percent fill). There was some improvement in the functioning of the servers with the addition of the new 36GB drive installation
To improve disk balance, directories are often moved from /disk to /disk. The combination of moves applies to both the AMP and VOLT servers, since we are keeping the directory locations on the respective data disks identical. This is to facilitate disk copying in the event of failure. However we are not sure this is having the desired affect. Some changes in the archiving period may be needed soon. This would be an interim measure until major changes in AMP data storage are accomplished.
Therefore, planning and preparation began to upgrade both the AMP and VOLT data servers. We are working on gathering data on price and availability developments regarding the components needed. The current machines are quite old. We want to increase the disk space and use a RAID with redundancy so that recovering from faulty disks is easy. We are finalizing the requirements for the new AMP and VOLT servers and expect to have them on purchase early next period.
The group is in the process of testing a new system board for use in the AMPlets. We need to resolve this issue soon, because we will need to assemble AMPlet machines for the additional 10 I2/Abilene locations (Observatory Project). Since the Pentium III system boards are going out of manufacture, it will be necessary to go to Pentium IV boards. At first there appeared to be some FreeBSD incompatibilities but at this time those items seem to have been resolved. The test is running successfully. Researched alternate boards with a built-in GigE interface, as we expect that this will become more important shortly.
AMP staff discussed the implementation of the serial console on AMPlets. We worked to research the implementation of the serial console and it developed to be quite straightforward in FreeBSD. This may be something to be deployed on all AMP sites since it allows for the use of a laptop instead of a keyboard and monitor to examine misbehaving AMP monitors. This capability had been requested by site amp-surf (SURFnet, in Amsterdam), it has now been implemented on the SURFnet monitor.
The SURFnet people are also interested in our implementing a remote or automatic reboot on the machine because it is difficult for them to get it done manually. Therefore, we have also been researching up-to-date methods of remote rebooting. We have found a product that appears to be the solution. We will do some more research and may recommend the use of the product on selected sites. We are also testing an IP addressable power controller. With an additional assigned IP address we can remotely reboot a machine.
All sites have had patched sshd versions 3.4 installed except for a few sites which were offline during the update. The system manager will be run to perform that update when each is brought back online.
A total of 51 remote sites in the AMP infrastructure received attention during this period: most were resolved during the quarter and the monitors are again collecting data. Six were still being investigated, or pending site action, at the end of the period. (Outages are considered "open" until the monitor is again collecting data.)
The month of October had many more problem sites than would be expected. This turned out to be due to sites blocking ICMP traffic. Apparently the ICMP blockage issue began as a response to the blaster and nachi worms. Then the nachi worm caused router tables to fill and create DOS conditions. Some AMP machines were turned off as a result of the chaos. At its peak, fourteen AMP machines were either turned off or had ICMP blocks at the routers. By the end of the period site problems and outages had returned to the low levels enjoyed, before the rash of worms.
More detail on these activities can be found in the monthly reports for this reporting period, available at:
http://moat.nlanr.net/Reports/MNA/200310Oct.html
http://moat.nlanr.net/Reports/MNA/200311Nov.html
http://moat.nlanr.net/Reports/MNA/200312Dec.html
Two ongoing projects during the quarter: the Snort intrusion detection Web site, and the IQEYE camera. The Snort Web site displays graphs of the rates at which certain IP addresses send illegal packets across the network and graphs of the total amount of intrusions detected over user-specified time periods. There is also a network intrusion status page and a daily email report in development.
The IQEYE camera project involves writing a device driver for a camera that will be functioning in a wireless communications scenario. The camera will be attached to the back of a plane and will take pictures of the ground when a button is pushed. It will also be connected to a wireless card that will transmit images as the plane files into areas with wireless connectivity.
~ Presentations and Conference/Meeting Participation
Joint Engineering Team (JET) Meeting, Arlington, VA, Oct. 2003: Tony gave presentation on NLANR AMP to the JET meeting. Ronn introduced Tony's teleconference presentation, and attended most of the meeting and met with a number of people including Rick Summerhill.
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC),Miami, FLA, Oct. 10-27,2003: Jörg attended the IMC2003 and found it to be overall a good and worthwhile conference.
SC2003, Phoenix, AZ, Nov. 15-21: In the SCinet Network Operations Center(NOC), we installed an AMP machine and two OC192 monitors. Ronn attended. He worked with Kevin Walsh (SDSC ENS) on the Bandwidth Challenge and served as a judge. Jim went in advance of the start to install the three NLANR/MNA machines. Mike attended and assisted with SCinet activities and other arrangements. 150 copies of the current issue of the Network Analysis Times were distributed. Virtually all members of the team contributed to our presence at SC2003.
WIDE-CAIDA-RIPE-NLNET workshop at ISI, Nov. 7, 2003,Marina del Rey, CA: Matthew gave a talk about the IPv6 Scamper project. Tony attended the workshop, the topics included IPv6, DNS, and BGP measurement.
INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE(IETF), Minneapolis, MN, Nov. 9-14 2003: Matthew on short notice gave a talk about IPMP at the Transport Area Working Group (TSVWG) meeting. He also attended the IPv6 working groups, IPPM, TSVWG, and IEPG.
Internet Statistics and Metrics Analysis (ISMA) Bandwidth Estimation Workshop, San Diego, CA, Dec. 9-10, 2003 Matthew and Tony attended (by invitation only). Matthew presented his paper, "Segmentation of Internet paths for capacity estimation." Bud, Jim, Ronn, Maureen, and Mike sat in on Matthew's presentation.
Measurement Architecture Workshop, SDSC, CA, December 11-12, 2003 Ronn Ritke, Tony McGregor attended. Tony presented on NLANR AMP.
Tony gave the NLANR AMP talk at Auckland University; this was the last of the NZ talks (towards developing an AMP mesh in NZ).
Jörg had visitors, a Professor from Finland and students from Finland and Sweden, (and some from University of Waikato). He gave them a 90 minute overview presentation on passive measurement research and technology, including current NLARN PMA strategies.
~ Publications, Networked Data, Documentation
Matthew submitted an abstract on his IPMP Bandwidth Capacity work for the CAIDA ISMA Bandwidth Estimation Workshop (December) - which was accepted. http://www.wand.net.nz/~mjl12/luckie2003isma.pdf
The latest version of the IPMP IETF Internet Draft was submitted for review in the IETF. Changes suggested by Randy Presuhn, editor of the SNMPv2 RFC were incorporated into this version. http://www.wand.net.nz/~mjl12/draft-mcgregor-ipmp-03.txt
Gina Intrilligator (SDSC External Relations Dept.) posted Mike and Ronn's article on our international efforts on the SDSC Web site. She created a great image and tag line. It was on the main SDSC page for a week or so, it is now available in the news section at: http://www.sdsc.edu/Press/features/120203_NLANR.html
This article links to a more detailed second part on the NLANR/MNA Web site ( http://moat.nlanr.net/International/partB_article.html). Also a version that combines both of these into one document is available. http://moat.nlanr.net/International/overviewOct03.html
The following abstracts were submitted to PAM2004:
Gross, Christopher W., Jörg B. Micheel, and Hans-Werner Braun. Design and Implementation of a Scalable Real-Time Network Sensor.
Luckie, Matthew and Tony McGregor. Segmentation of Internet Paths for Capacity Estimation.
McGregor, Anthony J., Perry Lorier, and Mark Hall. Flow Clustering Using the EM Machine Learning Algorithm.
Mochalski, Klaus and Jörg Micheel. A Real-time Packet Burst Metric.
We received notification that one of our PAM2004 submissions, "Flow Clustering Using Machine Learning" was accepted. This year there was only a short abstract requirement (2 pages) which apparently led to a huge number of submissions: about 180 submissions were received, and only 30 were accepted.
Jae-Min Lee, Jian-Bo Gao, Ronn Ritke, and Tony McGregor's "Characterization of end-to-end packet dynamics in the Internet" was submitted to Sigmetrics 2004. Another version of this paper will be submitted to the Special issue of Performance Evaluation.
A new issue of the Network Analysis Times was published with our AMP IPv6 efforts as the focus. We received wonderful articles from Bill Owens (NYSERNET) and Joe St Sauver (Univ. of Oregon) to use, and Larry Blunk sent copies of his IPv6 slides, which were excerpted into a short article.
Developed and created the final design style parameters for the new MNA, PMA, and AMP Web pages. A primary aspect of the design are the two images in the navbar. These narrow images are "teasers" to highlight our latest activities (with a "more info" link); they will be dynamic, (i.e., rotated on a regular basis and as needs arise). Some of the simpler elements of cascading style sheets (i.e., CSS1) were incorporated into the page templates as embedded and inline style links to HTML. We do not want to use the advanced style sheet tags/style or external style sheet because a large number of our core audience do not use browsers capable of rendering them correctly. We received feedback that the intended goal of the design of the navbar, using the rotating featured images, is working to draw visitors to check out what is behind these images.
Splash pages were developed for the AMP Web interface page. This involved writing PHP scripts to manage latitude and longitude as well as display the locations of remote AMP sites (upon a topological map). Our solution to the problem that the large number of AMPlets (~140) makes displaying them clearly very difficult was to create separate US and International maps, each in two sizes (standard screen size and very large, >1400 pixel width). In addition, the script was adapted to place sites relative to the latitude/longitude in a manner to that they are far enough apart to not overlap excessively ("closest available space"). As before, the AMP site maps are interactive and take the viewer to the data for the site clicked. http://watt.nlanr.net/active/maps/ampmap_active.php
Discussion and investigations of what mechanism we should use for preserving state for the new AMP Web pages took place. We want something that works well over a range of different user types, in particular users who do not use cookies.
An updated AMP IPv6 map with all 13 of the current IPv6 sites was created. http://moat.nlanr.net/NATimes/NAT.4.1.pdf
After multiple discussions regarding an approach to unifying the look on our Web site, easing global modifications (not just format/style changes, but significant changes in the navbar, for example), and which will allow the creation of Web pages that use a template without replicating the template within every page, we decided on a plan using the C preprocessor command to #define and #include components. We will also create a make file that runs cpp on the files whenever the appropriate components have changed. An important factor here was that most of even CSS1 style sheet tags are not rendered properly by many of the older browsers which many in our community still use. This plan addresses that problem as well. We began the creation of this C preprocess/make file system which changed slightly to an m4 makefile system. A sample was created which was expanded upon; it appears that this will work well for what we need. We began to develop full templates that can be adapted for AMP, PMA, and MNA pages. A test run worked well.
A draft PMA Web page directory infrastructure was developed and approved, as part of the planned revamping the PMA Web pages.
The new tool, HEC calculators (Javascript checksum calculator), were added to the MNA software page. http://moat.nlanr.net/tools.html
The feature images of the navbar design were taken live (100 pixel width "teaser" images of highlighted activities) with links to the appropriate "more info" pages.
In preparation for a new NLANR poster, we developed the list of activities which will be highlighted. The list includes AMP software repackage goals, OC192 plans, OC48 traces, longer traces, real-time analysis, IPMP, Observatory project with international collaborations map at bottom. Gathering of background and current status on these efforts was begun as a prelude to writing the text.
~ Cichlid 3-D Visualization System Activities
Worked on the GUI interface to Cichlid, refining the way in which the QT objects are set up and that connections are initiated. Began creating a 'release' version of the Cichlid code. Several features still need to be completed (particularly support for labels and vertex-edge graphs). Worked on the state table that governs the GUI and integrating the project with automake/autoconf.
Began work on a collaborative project with HPWREN/ROADNet which involves developing a Cichlid server for the display of earthquake related data (animated). Completed a proof of concept. Wrote code that uses triangles to approximate an arbitrary terrain, such that a terrain map of San Diego County could be read in and displayed. Code that will animate a ripple-like effect over the surface of the terrain was written. Finished the code that generates the vertex arrays and vertex normals with smoothing.
~ A job description was drafted and a preliminary search conducted for an AMP Software Engineer to work on the reimplementation of AMP, in particular the next phase of code for the data collectors.
Chris Gross has been concentrating on further development of the remote network sensor he began while in New Zealand over the summer. He wrote a paper for PAM2004 about his work thus far. Writing the paper afforded him the opportunity to reflect on the project as a whole to see if he is continuing on the correct path which he and Jörg laid out in New Zealand. He also learned much about his direction with sensor by explaining the reason behind and benefits of it. The paper really gave him an opportunity to fully see what he had done and where he needs to go. In short, it provided a much-needed boost to be even more excited about the project. The main focus for the sensor now is on upper layer flows and TCP analysis.
Matthew Luckie continues to take the lead on two significant AMP projects, IPMP and AMP IPv6 (and IPv6 Scamper). The AMP IPv6 project was featured extensively in the latest edition of Network Analysis Times. Funded by CAIDA, he attended and presented at the CAIDA-WIDE workshop at ISI and the IETF in Minneapolis in November. He attended and presented at the ISMA Bandwidth Estimation Workshop in December (attendance was by invitation only).
His PhD work has continued to take shape. He has written introductory chapters to outline the work he has done so far. The IPv6 Scamper project has continued to evolve, with Path-MTU support for IPv4 and IPv6 the latest feature. Matthew is looking at surveying the MTU status of links between sets of AMP monitors and providing this information to interested parties.
In addition to papers submitted to ISMA and PAM on his Bandwidth Estimation work, he took the lead on improving and further developing the IPMP IETF Internet Draft which was submitted. He was also a coauthor on another PAM submission "Identifying IPv4/IPv6 Path Differences in the Dual-Stack World". Kenjiro Cho (WIDE) is the primary author on that paper and Bradley Huffaker (CAIDA) is also an author. http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/~kjc/tmp/draft.ps
Lana Kennedy continued her work with Maureen as she learned to do more and more of the compilation necessary for the monthly and quarterly reports. She and Maureen are working on a new system for the reports to make turnaround time faster and more efficient, and also to allow Lana to begin writing more of the finished product. Lana formatted Mike and Ronn's "NLANR International Successes" article into two Web pages, and these were posted on the NLANR/MNA Web site.
Lana also worked on the latest issue of the Network Analysis Times, an IPv6-themed issue. She compiled information from past progress reports for brief articles (which will also serve in Maureen's next design for the MNA home page highlights), designed the layout portion of the newsletter, and helped edit the finished version. Working with Lee Dolan (Human Resources) and Maureen, Lana updated and formatted Hans-Werner's academic biography to meet the new standards specified by the Jacobs School of Engineering. This process was a good learning experience for her: she gained a better understanding of the differences between refereed and non-refereed conferences, and of the different types of academic works that are produced in the research community.
Lana met with Tony when he was at SDSC, and was reallocated from the Iperf bandwidth project to a new programming assignment, a path display tool. The program's graphic output will display the path under investigation, and show portions of the paths it shares with nearby monitors to help locate problem paths. Under Tony's guidance, she began enthusiastically, splitting the project into two parts: a text output and a graphic interpretation of that output. Lana has written, and nearly finished debugging, the text output portion, and is excited to soon be working on the graphic display. She has learned a lot about C++ programming conventions and creating streamlined, efficient code, as well as how the AMP machines interact with one another and with the network.
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