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Equipment Sharing

This page gives an overview of the Equipment Sharing, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description

This is the University of Cambridge research facilities and equipment searchable database. This allows University members to search entries in the Research Facilities and Equipment Database

Service Status

The Equipment Sharing is currently live.

Contact

Technical queries and support should be directed to development team and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service. To ensure that you receive a response, always direct requests to development team rather than reaching out to team members directly.

Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues in the application repository.

Environments

The Equipment Sharing is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name URL Supporting VMs
Production admin app: https://www.equipment.admin.cam.ac.uk/esd-admin/
web front-end : https://www.equipment.admin.cam.ac.uk/		 equipment-sharing-live1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
equipment-sharing-live2.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
Internal http://equipment-sharing-live1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk:8080/esd-admin/ equipment-sharing-staging1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk

Source code

The source code for the Equipment sharing is can be found on Gitlab repository:

Repository Description
Application https://gitlab.developers.cam.ac.uk/uis/devops/equipshare/equipshare

Technologies used

The following gives an overview of the technologies the Equipment Sharing is built on.

Category Language Framework(s)
Web Java Spring
Front end PHP Symfony, Guzzle, Capifony Composer

Operational documentation

The following gives an overview of how the Equipment Sharing is deployed and maintained.

How and where the Equipment Sharing is deployed

Deploying web service, copy equipshare .war file to tomcat installation location: /opt/apache-tomcat-8.5.73/webapps restart tomcat : systemctl restart tomcat.service

Deploying a php front end

Through Capifony on saw. (For example, inside /home/httpd/capifony/equipment execute “cap prod deploy”.)

Monitoring

Logging - locations, levels Apps logs (Monolog) to /home/httpd/www.equipment.admin.cam.ac.uk/shared/app/logs. Probably should be log-rotated as it will fill up over time.

Other operation issues

As the Research Facilities and Equipment Database web service is a bit broken, there are some workarounds in the code:

  • When something doesn’t exist a 200 response is returned with an empty body, BrokenResponseListener converts this in a 404.
  • A load of data in the database is broken (eg phone numbers like 00000 000000, email addresses like unknown@cam.ac.uk), so the MisdEquipmentSharingDataCleaningBundle tries to tidy it up.

See also http://jira.devtools.admin.cam.ac.uk/browse/ESWEB.

Service Management and tech lead

The service owner for the Equipment Sharing is TBD.

The service manager for the Equipment Sharing is TBD.

The tech lead for the Equipment Sharing is TBD.

The following engineers have operational experience with the Equipment Sharing and are able to respond to support requests or incidents: