The war against the Ad Blockers

Many web sites these days are identifying which browsers have Ad Blcokers configured, and ask the ad blockers to be disabled. I am not entirely sure whether it is the decision of the ad blocker developers to make these ad blockers easy to detect, or is it technically difficult to implement an ad blocker that can go unnoticed by these web sites.

To be honest, I did not do any research on what is really the case. There is of course some point in these web sites. Their major revenue is from the advertisements, and if we block it through the ad blockers, they lose their major revenue. So I am not going to blame them either. Just wondering who is responsible for the current weak situation with the ad blockers - or is it just Adblock Plus?

Border towns and villages

I am a huge fan of border towns and villages. This was my first border crossing by a train, from Berlin to Küstrin-Kietz (Germany) to Kostrzyn/Küstrin (Poland). I walked for around 12 km in the historical town of Küstrin, and basically roamed around the entire town visiting the landmarks - all without asking anyone routes or using a smart phone for maps. I am happy that I was not lost even at a single point. I guess I am getting used to going to a remote location and starting a random walk.

WiFi Stories

So Ubuntu keeps a list of networks that it had connected to before. You can basically view all those wifi and wired internet connections you had in the past, by

$  ls /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections

I have a long list in my computer. In addition, my phone and Nexus 7 have their own long list. I have even forgotten the origin of some of these system connections - when did I connect to these WiFi networks!

28 -- ??
ABC -- Airport Business Center
AdareHotel -- The hotel I stayed in London in 2014.
AdareHotel_EXT -- Same as above.
AirFranceLounge -- Paris CDG Airport
Airport WiFi -- airport
ALBROHOUSE -- ??
Anantara Kihavah WiFi -- maldives ??
arq_wifi -- ??
ART-HOTEL -- An Art hotel that I stayed. Forgot where that was located.
ATL Free Wi-Fi -- ??
ATT39pxl25 -- Home in Atlanta
Auto Ethernet -- The default wired connection
AWG-WiFi -- ??
Best Prime Solutions -- ??
Boingo Hotspot -- The regular airport WiFi. Mostly I used in Lisboa airport.
Boingo Hotspot 1 -- Same as above.
bora-bora -- My friend's home in Belgrade.
BS Tours Hotspot 1 -- The wifi in Rijeka's intercity bus stop.
BTOpenzone -- ??
CarrisTur -- ??
Clinica Dr. Varela Silva -- A dentist in Lisboa
DESCARTES -- The Paris university where MASCOTS 2014 was held.
Dhiraagu Wireless Zone -- ??
Dialog 4G -- ??
Dlink -- ??
Docomomo -- ??
eduroam -- The greatest eduroam university network.
EmoryUnplugged -- Emory wifi.
esw635 -- ??
ESW-Home -- ??
Excelsior Rooms - The hotel I stayed in Paris, 2014.
extremeGSD - INESC-ID Lisboa connection.
Fejan - Fejan island in Sweden - we go there for EMDC summer events.
FON_ZON_FREE_INTERNET - A useless "free" internet in Lisbon, that connects by default, and is not really free.
FreeInternet -- ??
Free_Public_WIFI -- ??
GEOMETRAL -- A company in Benfica Lisboa, next to our apartment.
GRW-Slajs -- ??
_Heathrow Wi-Fi -- Heathrow airport.
hhonors -- ??
hhonors-public -- Same as above, of course.
HOME-65C2 -- Some home internet.
Homeinternet -- Same as above.
homerun -- ??
HotSpot -- ??
Hyatt - Santa Clara hotel when I visited for OpenDaylight Summit 2015.
Instant Internet -- ??
ISCTE-IUL - The Lisboa's business school.
KFC FREE WIFI -- Which KFC is that?
LieBaoWiFi346 -- Virtual Internet wifi software from China.
Lorca -- ??
MEO-7CC9C1 -- Some Lisboa home internet.
MEO-84E288 -- Same as above

Some interesting wifi names

MEO-624A55 -- Same as above
MEO-626B69 -- Same as above
MEO-93715A -- My first apartment in Lisboa
MEO-93715A 1 -- Same as above.
MEO-WiFi -- Another useless common open wifi. Never worked.
M&F Lisboa -- My Lisboa apartment in Benfica.
M&F Lisboa 1 -- Same as above.
Mobitel Default 1 -- The mobile internet where I stayed in Sri Lanka in 2015.
Motel6-2 -- Motel 6 in Tempe, when I visited there for IC2E 2015.
Motel6-3 -- Same as above.
MSP-WiFi -- ??
opencsv -- ??
Opendaylight2.4 -- ??
OptiDSL_ECEE -- ??
PARC55-MEETING -- Internet during AMIA-CRI 2016.
Podmurvice -- ??
Red Coach 1 - Hotel in San Francisco where we stayed during the AMIA-CRI.
Red Coach 2 - Same as above.
Reimersholme Hotel - The place we stayed during my KTH graduation. A beautiful island in Stockholm.
RIJEKA - FREE ACCESS -- Free Internet in the Rijeka city center. Loved it.
sala537 -- A wifi from INESC-ID. Never worked.
Schiphol_Airport_WiFi -- Amsterdam airport
SC HOTSPOT -- ??
Thomson53AEC4 -- ??
TP-LINK_843F0A -- ??
UltraGSD -- INESC-ID internet.
_VINCI Airports wifi - Lisboa Airport internet.
*WIFI-AIRPORT -- An airport wifi. Not sure which is that.
zhen_xing303 -- The hotel in Shenzhen.
zhen_xing503 - Same as above.
zhen_xing505 - Same as above.
zhin_xing304 - Same as above.
#SFO FREE WIFI - San Francisco free wifi during my trip in 2016. Never really worked, if I remember correctly.

Today I was at S. Domingos Benfica bus stop waiting for the bus to go to my lab. I opened my laptop since there was a considerable waiting time. Then I found a lot of Wi-Fi connections - all protected. Some Wi-Fi names are funny. :D 

Are you the owner of the "OneDoesNotSimplyStealMyWifi "? The Wi-Fi name sounds more like a challenge though. :D

SENDIM for Incremental Development of Cloud Networks: Simulation, Emulation & Deployment Integration Middleware

This is my third and final paper at IC2E 2016. I presented it yesterday. I used a presentation style that is different than my previous presentations, just not to give a repeating feeling to the audience, as majority of them had attended one of my other two presentations. The presentation slides are given below.

SENDIM for Incremental Development of Cloud Networks: Simulation, Emulation \& Deployment Integration Middleware from Kathiravelu Pradeeban

Abstract: Cloud networks are tested over simulation, emulation, and physical environments at different stages of development. Configuration management tools manage deployments and migrations across different cloud platforms, mitigating tedious system administration efforts. However, currently a cloud networking simulation cannot be migrated into an emulation, or vice versa, without rewriting and manually re-deploying the simulated application. This paper presents SENDIM, a Simulation, Emulation, aNd Deployment Integration Middleware for cloud networks. As an orchestration platform for incrementally building Software-Defined Cloud Networks (SDCN), SENDIM manages the development and deployment of algorithms and architectures the entire length from visualization, simulation, emulation, to physical deployments.

CHIEF: Controller Farm for Clouds of Software-Defined Community Networks

This is my second presentation at IC2E. Last year also I presented my paper in SDS, and this is my second time publishing my paper at SDS. I always have had a good time at SDS. Given below is the presentation slides.

CHIEF: Controller Farm for Clouds of Software-Defined Community Networks from Kathiravelu Pradeeban

Abstract: Community networks leverage networking resources from the community itself to offer telecommunication networks for the same community. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a global view of the elements composing the network. Due to its scalability, SDN paradigm has been extended for many other networks including social networks and community networks, in addition to its initial focus, traditional data center networks. This paper designs CHIEF, a networking platform for clouds of Software-Defined Community Networks. CHIEF offers a controller farm through a federation of SDN controllers, to orchestrate the multi-tenanted community network. CHIEF enables interoperable clouds of community networks by extending and deploying a federated and orchestrated cluster of SDN controllers, further enabling complimentary business functionalities such as monitoring, throttling, and metering for inter-community network clouds.

SDN-Based Enhancements to QoS and Data Quality in Multi-Tenanted Data Center Clouds

I am currently in Berlin, presenting 3 of my papers at IC2E conference at TU Berlin. Given below is my doctoral symposium paper presentation, which basically summarizes the progress of my PhD during these first two years of my EMJD-DC life.

SDN-Based Enhancements to QoS and Data Quality in Multi-Tenanted Data Center Clouds from Kathiravelu Pradeeban

Abstract: Tenants assume various roles in the enterprise data center networks, requiring a differentiated Quality of Service (QoS), data quality and isolation guarantees among them. Traditionally, data storage and processing are handled in either distributed, or centralized manner. While distributed execution offers a higher horizontal scalability, it often comes with a trade-off of lack of centralized control, and hence often with a decreased accuracy and management efficiency.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a global view of the entire data center network to a logically centralized controller. Hence, it provides the best of both worlds with minimal compromises: (i) scalability of the large-scale distributed systems. (ii) unified management capabilities of the traditional centralized systems. By deploying an extended SDN controller architecture, we attempt to enhance the data quality of stored and processed data and increase the QoS of the multi-tenanted data center network clouds.

Associating IAM roles to the IAM instance profile

We were getting some weird error when trying to create a simple EMR cluster using an AWS admin account with all access that was recently created.

Terminated with errorsFailed to provision ec2 instances because 'IAM Instance Profile "arn:aws:iam::...:instance-profile/EMR_EC2_DefaultRole" has no associated IAM Roles (Service: AmazonEC2; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidParameterValue; Request ID: ..)'

We have reported this to AWS, and still waiting for a decent reply (already got some canned response, which was useless). Let me know if you have encountered this before, and how did you resolve this.

In the mean time, we are trying to work-around this by allowing all EC2 actions and Elastic MapReduce actions to the admin account. Given below is the set of actions that we performed.

Go to:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?region=us-west-2#policies

Select:
Create Your Own Policy

Give a name:  emrAllPolicy
(any name is fine)
Description:  Give all access to emr 
(anything)
Policy Document:
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
       {
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Resource": "*",
           "Action": [
               "cloudwatch:*",
               "dynamodb:*",
               "ec2:*",
               "elasticmapreduce:*",
               "kinesis:CreateStream",
               "kinesis:DeleteStream",
               "kinesis:DescribeStream",
               "kinesis:GetRecords",
               "kinesis:GetShardIterator",
               "kinesis:MergeShards",
               "kinesis:PutRecord",
               "kinesis:SplitShard",
               "rds:Describe*",
               "s3:*",
               "sdb:*",
               "sns:*",
               "sqs:*"
           ]
       }
    ]
}

Validate policy and create policy using the relevant options.

Once the above policy is created,
Go to:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?region=us-west-2#roles/EMR_EC2_DefaultRole

Click attach policy, search for the policy you just created (if it does not show up, feel free to refresh your browser and retry from the attach policy step again).

Once you found the policy, click and attach it to the IAM instance profile (EMR_EC2_DefaultRole) above, using "Attach Policy" option.

Retry the failed operation.

You may also use the IAM Policy Simulator (by using Simulate Policy option) to simulate all the actions in relevant services to confirm that they are successful in performing those actions, quickly.

This is a related read.