Author: Tom Barbette

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Extracting list of awarded badges on Moodle

A nice feature of Moodle is badges. Badges can be given to students as rewards for good actions, and incite them to do better and follow activities.

However, as often in Moodle, the functionalities are quite limited. One missing feature is the ability to give a badge to a list of user from an external system, e.g. using a CSV file. You can select students one by one in a list, which is cumbersome. As most as possible, for mass awarding you should try to use some “scripting” : for instance awarding badges when users finish an activity, with a certain grate.

The more problematic one I did not forsee was the inability to export badges. I wanted to give a small bonus points for students who won some badges. I thought of two leads : the moodle backups where I could extract the badges from the XML, and create a LTI activity to “steal” the badges.

The Moodle backups, even if you click on “Badges”, actually do not include badges in the backup… In 4 months this is the 4th bug I hit… After 3 confirmed bug that got no activity, I don’t even report them anymore… The Moodle community is rather slow, and internal resources are limited. The LTI 1.2 activities as far as I can tell do not have access to badges so that was a no-go as well.

So the solution was to do some web scraping. After trying multiple chrome extensions (connecting to moodle through GET/POST request would be very complicated because of OAuth), I could finally do a correct extraction with this extension : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web-scraper-free-web-scra/jnhgnonknehpejjnehehllkliplmbmhn/related?hl=en

This extension supports following links, because there’s of course no web pages allowing to see all badges per students. You must “click” on the number of students for each badge, and then follow the pagination as there’s a limit of 50 students per pages.

TLDR

Install the extension, go on the “Manage badges” pages on your Moodle course, and then press F12 to open chrome developer tools. Go to the new “Web Scraper” page and then “Create new sitemap” -> “Import sitemap”.

Here’s the “sitemap” defining how to follow links and scrape badge names, students that were awarded the badges, while supporting pagination.

{"_id":"moodle_badges","startUrl":["https://moodle.uclouvain.be/badges/index.php?type=2&id=5788"],"selectors":[{"id":"Awards","multiple":true,"parentSelectors":["_root"],"selector":".awards a","type":"SelectorLink"},{"id":"Element","multiple":true,"parentSelectors":["Pages"],"selector":"tbody tr","type":"SelectorElement"},{"id":"Name","multiple":false,"parentSelectors":["Element"],"regex":"","selector":".cell.c0 a","type":"SelectorText"},{"id":"Pages","paginationType":"clickMore","parentSelectors":["Awards","Pages"],"selector":"nav:first-of-type li a[aria-label=\"Next\"].page-link","type":"SelectorPagination"},{"id":"BadgeName","multiple":false,"parentSelectors":["Awards"],"regex":"","selector":"h1","type":"SelectorText"}]}

Press Sitemap -> Scrape and voilà. After a while you can download a CSV or an XLSX.

As a bonus, what I want is the number of badges per students, so here’s the formula to put on the student list where the Name and FirstName are separated columns:

=NB.SI(Badges!E:E;CONCAT([@Name];" ";[@FirstName]))

Tested on Moodle 3.9.

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Leaving ownCloud for good

ownCloud was kind of abandonned after the fork to nextcloud. I wanted to stay true to my historic privide cloud hoster. But the lack of support for PHP 8.1 now that 7.X is EOL killed it for good.

Two messages for anyone that comes here through random search :

  • There is no way to migrate automatically to nextcloud anymore. Chances are you updated beyond ownCloud 10.5, and there’s no downgrade possible. So don’t try.
  • Long life nextCloud! I didn’t realise the many things I was missing with ownCloud… NextCloud has million more features. So leave ownCloud now and go to nextCloud.
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A collection of Network Systems icons in SVG

You can use mine as you wish, I tried to find the original authors and the appropriate license whenever I could. Don’t hesitate to send me your own.

NAND SSD (inspired from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NAND-ssd.svg, CC )
RAM Module ( inspired from https://fr.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fichier:Ram-module.svg CC)
CPU (absed on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract_i7_CPU_icon.svg, CC)
DPI (unsure but I think it’s my own. Anyway it’s standard)
Fast (own)

GPU (own)
IPSEC (unsure)
Load Balancer (unsure)
Monitoring, monitor, measurements (unsure)

Mellanox NIC (not SVG, Mellanox)
100G NIC (inspired from the above, consider my own I guess)

Router (unsure, but this is quite sandard…)
VLAN (own)

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Retina: Analyzing 100 GbE Traffic on Commodity Hardware

I’m pleased to announce Retina has been accepted to appear at SIGCOMM at the end of the month ! It is the result of a pleasant collaboration with Gerry Wan, Fengchen Gong and Zakir Durumeric from Stanford.

Retina enables high-speed network forensics by building a binary tailored to a specific experiment written in Rust. It provides convenient filtering capabilities to easily answer questions such as “Is the TLS SNI really random?” or “How many TLS handshake are destined to Netflix?”. Tested at up to 160Gbps with a commodity server on a Stanford traffic TAP, it supports 5-100x higher traffic rates than standard “bloatware” IDSes.

paper ; github ; the video will follow after SIGCOMM

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New position: Assitant Professor at UCLouvain

I’m delighted to announce I’ll start as assistant professor on the 1st of September in the INGI department of the ICTEAM, EPL faculty at UCLouvain. Right where I am currently conducting my post-doc.

I’ll continue my research on high-speed networking and programmable networks (including Smart NICs) while taking care of multiple lectures. Stay tuned for exciting news !

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MPTCP on Windows with WSL2

Limitations

It is possible to use MPTCP, but WSL2 uses a virtual interface that prevents advertising multiple paths. There might be a solution using multiple forwarded ports but I haven’t been able to use it yet.

Prerequisite

Install Ubuntu in WSL2 (simply look for Ubuntu in the Microsoft Store)

Optional: Allow Windows to keep both Wifi and Ethernet open

Windows will automatically turn off wifi when Ethernet is plugged in. If you want to try MPTCP over Wifi + Ethernet (or 4G through USB, all the same) you must disable this behavior :

1. Open Registry Editor.

2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WcmSvc\Local.

3. Create/change the fMinimizeConnections registry DWORD to 0.

4. Close Registry Editor and reboot.

Step 1 : Install an MPTCP-compatible Kernel (easier than it sounds!)

sudo apt install build-essential flex bison libssl-dev libelf-dev
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.git
cp Microsoft/config-wsl .config

Edit .config and change “#CONFIG_MPTCP is not set” by CONFIG_MPTCP=y

make
cp arch/x86/boot/vmlinux/mnt/c/vmlinux

Then shut down WSL in a CMD window:

wsl --shutdown

And to boot in your new kernel add a file in C:\Users\$USER\.wslconfig

[wsl2]
kernel=C:\vmlinux

Step 2 : Install mptcpd

This is to get the “mptcpize” command to run a legacy TCP application with mptcp

sudo apt install mptcpd

Step 3 : Try it out !

sudo apt install iperf
sudo tcpdump -i  lo -w capture.pcap
mptcpize run iperf -s
mptcpize run iperf -c 127.0.0.1 -b 1k -l 1

Then open capture.pcap with wireshark and you should see MPTCP instead of TCP 🙂

Step 3 : SSH and failover

[todo!]
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Packet Order Matters won the NSDI’22 community award !

Data centers increasingly deploy commodity servers with high-speed network interfaces to enable low-latency communication. However, achieving low latency at high data rates crucially depends on how the incoming traffic interacts with the system’s caches. When packets that need to be processed in the same way are consecutive, i.e., exhibit high temporal and spatial locality, caches deliver great benefits.

In this paper, we systematically study the impact of temporal and spatial traffic locality on the performance of commodity servers equipped with high-speed network interfaces. Our results show that (i) the performance of a variety of widely deployed applications degrade substantially with even the slightest lack of traffic locality, and (ii) a traffic trace from our organization reveals poor traffic locality as networking protocols, drivers, and the underlying switching/routing fabric spread packets out in time (reducing locality).

To address these issues, we built Reframer, a software solution that deliberately delays packets and reorders them to increase traffic locality. Despite introducing μs-scale delays of some packets, we show that Reframer increases the throughput of a network service chain by up to 84% and reduces the flow completion time of a web server by 11% while improving its throughput by 20%.

Links : paper ; usenix

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VOO in bridge mode with IPv6 (optional: and prefix delegation!)

Despite old threads that can be seen on VOO’s forum, VOO do not seem to use SLAAC in bridge mode (anymore?), but DHCPv6. Also VOO only gives a /64 prefix so you can’t do internal subnets 🙁

Important: my outgoing (WAN) interface directly connected to the VOO modem in bridge mode is enx000ec6ec03b3 . My internal LAN interface is br0 (it’s a bridge between my actual eth0 LAN interface and a WiFi access point using hostapd, but that’s for another day).

This tutorial assumes Ubuntu 18.04:

sudo apt install wide-dhcpv6-client

sudo vi /etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c.conf

interface enx000ec6ec03b3 {
  send ia-na 1;
  send ia-pd 1;
  request domain-name-servers;
  request domain-name;
  script "/etc/wide-dhcpv6/dhcp6c-script";
};

# Only for prefix delegation
id-assoc pd 1 {
  prefix-interface br0 { #internal facing interface (LAN)
    sla-id 0; # subnet. Combined with ia-pd to configure the subnet for this interface.
    ifid 1; #IP address "postfix". if not set it will use EUI-64 address of the interface. Combined with SLA-ID'd prefix to create full IP address of interface.
    sla-len 0; # Number of prefix bits assigned. Sadly this is 0 with voo... 
    };
  };

  id-assoc na 1 {
  # id-assoc for eth1
};

sudo vi /etc/default/wide-dhcpv6-client

INTERFACES="enx000ec6ec03b3"

sudo service wide-dhcpv6-client restart

At this point you should get an IPv6 address:

enx000ec6ec03b3: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 109.89.XXX  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 109.89.XXXX
        inet6 2a02:2788:XXXXXXXXX:8458  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x0<global>
        inet6 fe80::20e:c6ff:feec:3b3  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 00:0e:c6:ec:03:b3  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 1358557038  bytes 1701875645905 (1.7 TB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 648168501  bytes 176987273193 (176.9 GB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

Enable prefix delegation

Actually enable the prefix delegation with radvd:

sudo apt-get install radvd

sudo vi /etc/radvd.conf

interface br0 # LAN interface
{
  AdvManagedFlag off; # no DHCPv6 server here.
  AdvOtherConfigFlag off; # not even for options.
  AdvSendAdvert on;
  AdvDefaultPreference high;
  AdvLinkMTU 1280;
  prefix ::/64 #pick one non-link-local prefix assigned to the interface and start advertising it
  {
    AdvOnLink on;
    AdvAutonomous on;
  };
};

sudo service radvd restart

Some configuration is taken and adapted from https://www.ipcalypse.ca/?p=204

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Combined stateful classification and session splicing for high-speed NFV service chaining at IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

After encountering novel challenges arising at 100G speeds, a follow-up longer version of our MiddleClick paper has been published in the IEEE/ACM Transaction on Networking journal in 2021 with hardware offloading, and an improved algorithm for combining sessions.

The code has been reverted into FastClick, allowing to have unique state management for multiple VNFs, automatically combined. On top of this session system, one can easily modify TCP or HTTP streams on the fly without full termination!

Check out the paper ! The code has been merged to FastClick. The experiments are fully reproducible and described here. You can also check the ToN page.

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The extended version of Cheetah: “A High-Speed Programmable Load-Balancer Framework With Guaranteed Per-Connection-Consistency” has been published in ACM/IEEE ToN

In this journal version, we extended our conference paper with additional, peer-reviewed material:

  • We implemented our system on QUIC using P4 and Picoquic. This demonstrates that our approach does not depend solely on TCP timestamps. The code in ‘bmv2’ and ‘p4-tofino’ has been made publicly available.  All of our code is available at https://github.com/cheetahlb/. 
  • We added an experiment using the Tofino implementation and the QUIC implementation of Cheetah for an HTTP webserver.
  • We added an experiment to verify whether today’s OSes support TCP timestamp, have them enabled by default, and correctly echo the TCP timestamp set by a server.
  • We added an experiment to verify the granularity of the TCP timestamp units used by some of the largest Alexa top 100 websites. 
  • We added a proof sketch on the size of the cookies given a number of servers. 
  • We added an implementation in bmv2 of the “TCP timestamp”-based system. We have also rewritten and published the P4- tofino code of the system. The implementation of the stateful LB is non-trivial as it requires the insertions/lookups/deletions operations to be applied in constant time (and more restrictions apply). We describe our implementation of a stack-based data structure for the Tofino in Section 4.3. 
  • We added a micro-benchmark of the performance of the Cheetah LB, e.g., compared SYN insertions with cuckoo, normal packets, 
  • We broke down the benefits of SSE parsing of TCP options instructions.
  • We evaluated the packet processing latency overheads of realizing Cheetah on a Tofino for both the TCP timestamp and QUIC implementation.
  • We clarified the design challenges in the introduction.

Check out the paper in open access !