pingER service

readme

about

PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) is the name given to the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) project to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links. It is led by SLAC and development includes NUST/NIIT, FNAL, GATech and ICTP/Trieste.

Originally in 1995 it was for the High Eneergy Physics community, however, this century it has been more focussed on measuring the Digital Divide from an Internet Performance viewpoint. The project now involves measurement to over 600 sites in over 125 countries, and we are actively seeking new sites to monitor and monitoring sites for this project, as well as people interested in our data.

PingER has a decade old data repository of network performance measurements from and to sites around the world. Currently, there are around 35 monitoring hosts in 13 countries monitoring over 300 sites in over 115 countries that amongst them contain around 99% of the worlds Internet connected population.

PingER provides insight into a multitude of network activity. To summarize the results, it is necessary to aggregate the measurements by region and to divided them into measurements of long-term trends and of short-term glitches.


uses for pingER

Technical: PingER data provides a lightweight way of monitoring the throughput, loss and response times, effectively measuring the quality of a particular link with little overhead. This also provides information for setting up and auditing Service Level Agreements.

Economical: Based on the presentation of the PingER findings, a recommendation can be made to the policy/funding people to increase the bandwidth. Furthermore, if one site in a certain region can attain credible connectivity, then other sites in that region should be able to have better connectivity as well. As a troubleshooting tool, PingER can be used to discern if a problem is network related, identify the time the problem started, whether it is still occurring, and provide quantitative analysis.

Collaboration: In order for scientists to collaborate, a certain level of link quality is required. By using PingER to measure the loss and RTT, you are able to provide expectations for the performance for bulk data transfer and other applications. In case of real-time collaboration, by comparing the results from PingER with various recommendations for loss, RTT and jitter, together with the perceptions of voice quality from the users, you can determine how well VoIP and other interactive applications might work between various pairs of sites.


architecture

PingER uses the ubiquitous Internet ping facility to measure the short and long term Response Time, Packet Loss percentages, the variability of the response time (jitter), and the lack of reachability (no response for a succession of pings).

Ping is usually pre-installed on almost all platforms, so there is nothing to install on the clients. The server (i.e. the echo responder) runs at a high priority (e.g. in the kernel on UNIX) and so is more likely to provide a good measure of network performance than a user application.

PingER is very modest in its network bandwidth requirements (~100 bps per monitoring-remote- host-pair for the way we use it).

Due to the volume of data that can be collected by PingER, perfSONAR-PS PingER can be configured to utilize SQLite, MySQL or Postgres storage backends.

perfSONAR-PS PingER is composed of two distinctive (kind of) components:

  1. Measurement Archive (MA): Which allows communication via XML document based Remote Procedure Call (XML) the data archive of PingER data.
  2. Measurement Point (MP): Which performs the measurement and calculation of derived statistics from Pings.

installation

Please read the INSTALL file for general instructions. Specifics are available with the code download.


configuration

If not started already, start MySQL:

(sudo) /etc/init.d/mysqld restart

If not done already, set the MySQL Root password:

(sudo) /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

Edit Files (each is annotated with locations and instructions). Run configuration script:

/opt/perfsonar_ps/PingER/bin/pinger_ConfigureDaemon

Answer all questions or accept defaults about desired location of the service/port/description etc... This script will attempt to create the MA database.

Check logging config file:

/etc/PingER/logger.conf

starting/stopping

The service comes with init scripts that may be used to start and stop operation:

/etc/init.d/PingER start
/etc/init.d/PingER stop
/etc/init.d/PingER restart

Create symlinks to allow automated start/stop at the boot/shutdown time:

ln -s /etc/init.d/PingER /etc/rc2.d/S99pinger-ps
ln -s /etc/init.d/PingEr /etc/rc6.d/K02pinger-ps
ln -s /etc/init.d/PingER /etc/rc0.d/K02pinger-ps

The service can also be run in a manual fashion (useful for debugging):

perl bin/daemon.pl --verbose --conf=etc/daemon.conf


testing

Test the web service:

/opt/perfsonar_ps/PingER/client/bin/pinger_client.pl

It will print something like this:

[netadmin@lhcopnmon1-mgm client]$ ./pinger_client.pl
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1-mgm.fnal.gov dst=tier2.ucsd.edu packetSize=1000
Metadata Key(s): 8 :
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1.fnal.gov dst=cithep130.ultralight.org packetSize=1000
Metadata Key(s): 22 :
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1.fnal.gov dst=tier2.ihepa.ufl.edu packetSize=1000
Metadata Key(s): 21 :
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1-mgm.fnal.gov dst=pinger.fnal.gov packetSize=1000
Metadata Key(s): 1 :
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1.fnal.gov dst=phedex.rcac.purdue.edu packetSize=1000
Metadata Key(s): 15 :
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1-mgm.fnal.gov dst=www.cmsaf.mit.edu packetSize=1000
Metadata Key(s): 9 :
Metadata: src=lhcopnmon1.fnal.gov dst=t2.unl.edu packetSize=1000

maintenance

Subscribe to the user mailing lists if you are seeking help on some problem related to this software. Announcements regarding availability of new releases will also be sent to these locations:

Also if you are using package management software and have installed the Internet2 software repository, a typical upgrade should download new releases:

yum update

or

apt-get dist-upgrade

Finally, check the following websites for news of software releases: