Jackdaw¶
This page gives an overview of the service, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.
Service Description¶
Jackdaw provides a database that holds consolidated user administration records for staff and students in the University. Jackdaw get daily feeds from CamSIS, CHRIS, the Card Office and daily feeds out to a variety of services/systems.
Service Status¶
Jackdaw is currently live.
Contact¶
Technical queries and support should be directed to servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk 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 servicedesk@uis.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.
Issues discovered in the service or new feature requests should be opened as GitLab issues here (DevOps and Service Manager only).
Environments¶
Jackdaw is currently deployed to the following environment:
| Name | URL | Supporting VMs |
|---|---|---|
| Production | https:/jackdaw.cam.ac.uk | skua.csi.cam.ac.uk |
| owl.csi.cam.ac.uk (standby) | ||
| jay.csi.cam.ac.uk (standby) | ||
| ruff.csi.cam.ac.uk (test) |
Different combinations of database, web server and pages are accessed via urls
of the format: https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk[:PORT]/~/[DatabaseName]/[TypeofPage]
e.g. https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk[:443,:8443]/~/[jackdaw,jdawdev.jdawtest,jdawtmp]/[t,-]
Specifically:
- https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk/ (same as https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk:443/~/jackdaw/-)
- Production server backed by production database and production pages
- https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk/t (same as https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk:443/~/jackdaw/t)
- Production server backed by production database test pages
- https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk:8443/
- Test server backed by production database (should be used with caution)
- https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk/~/[jdawdev,jdawtest,jdawtmp]
- Production server backed by develop/test/experiment DB - harmless good for what it is
- https://jackdaw.cam.ac.uk:8443/~/[jdawdev,jdawtest,jdawtmp]/t
- Good for testing DB patches, httpd config and test pages
Source code¶
The source code for future Jackdaw development is under the https://gitlab.developers.cam.ac.uk/uis/devops/iam/jackdaw-projects group.
Multiple RCS directories on the production server replicated to standby servers using bespoke Replication Manager.
Technologies used¶
The following gives an overview of the technologies Jackdaw is built on.
| Category | Language | Framework(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Server | Perl/v5.18.2 PerlToolKit PLSQL | Apache/2.2.34 (Unix) mod_perl/2.0.8 |
| Client | Jquery |
Operational and other documentation¶
- Jackdaw on Confluence
- Jackdaw - service definition
- Jackdaw UIS JIRA
- Jackdaw HPC JIRA
- UIS help site documentation
- Web service API
Service Management and tech lead¶
The service owner for Jackdaw is Vijay Samtani
The service manager for Jackdaw is Dr Ujjwal Das
The following DevOps engineers have access to the Jackdaw service: