Dear Colleague,
 
        In order to improve the effectiveness of the eJournals Delivery Service
	(eJDS) of the Abdus Salam ICTP, we plan to extend it to embrace also 
	training and support for Local Area Networks installation and 
	management, together with support for setting up the main access to 
	Internet for the campuses.  Before that will be done, we need to make 
	a survey of those places around the World, which have the need of this 
	infrastructure. Therefore, we plan to monitor by PingER universities 
	and research institutions all over the Developing World following also 
	the recent "Recommendations of Trieste" to help bridging the Digital 
	Divide.
        
	We are very lucky to have the advice and assistance from Dr Les 
	Cottrell, from SLAC, who is one of the World experts in monitoring 
	sites, within the High Energy Physics community.
        In order to be able to do it your acceptance is needed, since there 
	is a minimal interference with your system in order to send pings 
	and get the responses from one host at your site.
        We hope that most hosts will be able to accommodate 10 
	pings with 100Bytes each each 30 mins, i.e. 800bits/s for 10 secs 
	each half hour or about 4.5bit/s on average.
        We need e-mail addresses for contact, and host names (e.g., 
	www.cern.ch or	pinger.slac.stanford.edu) for the remote hosts that 
	can be monitored via Internet ping.
        
	Below is the message from Dr Les Cottrell, with the problems that may 
	create, as well as what we need from you.

We hope your Institution will collaborate with us in this Monitoring project.

    Yours sincerely
    Hilda Cerdeira and the eJDS Team
    ICTP/TWAS Donation Programme

 
  
"To provide information on Internet connectivity to your site from Research 
and Education (R&E) sites around the world, we  would like to start 
monitoring a designated host at your site  using the ubiquitous Internet 
"ping" facility.

Initially we will monitor from a single monitoring host at  SLAC or ICTP. 
At a later time, we may decide that it is  important to monitor your host 
from more sites around the  world, and wish to add your host to the list 
of hosts  monitored from most or all of the monitoring sites (about  35). 
Before we take this step we will seek approval from the  contact at your 
site.
 
The impact on your site and the host will be minimal, no  software should 
need installing or maintaining, no special  account is needed, and the 
extra traffic from a monitoring  host to the host at your site will be 
such as to accommodate 10 pings with 100Bytes each 30 mins,
i.e., 8kbits/s for 10 secs per half hour or about 5bits/s
on average.

The designated host at your site will need to be available 24 hours/day, 
365 days/year, apart from occasional outages. It  must also be able to 
respond pings from the Internet (e.g. ping must not blocked or rate limited).  
Finally we will need the e-mail address of a contact whom we  may contact 
in case of problems (such as we cannot ping the  host at your site for 
an extended period of time), and to  provide information on the site's 
connectivity and location  (e.g. city or latitude/longitude) etc.
 
For more information see:
 http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/ the homepage for the  project  http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-> mon/deploy.html  deployment of PingER  http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/scs/net/talk/ictp-oct02.html
 talk at ICTP on "Monitoring Internet Connectivity of Research & Educational 
 Institutions" 
 
 "The PingER Project: Active Internet  Performance Monitoring for the HENP 
 Community" by Warren  Matthews and Les Cottrell was published in the IEEE  
 Communications Magazine May 2000 Vol 38 No. 5 issue.  

 http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-req.html
 information on the ideal requirements for a host that is being  monitored 
 by PingER."