New Releases for 5/01/08Submitted by kstaken on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 1:50am.Hello, This is a summary of recent activity in the JumpBox Open Collection. News
Have questions, comments or suggestions, please let us know how we can help. And remember, you can also get JumpBox updates on Twitter. Updated Production JumpBoxes
That's all for this time around. Thanks for supporting JumpBox. Kimbro »
New Releases for 4/15/08Submitted by kstaken on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 1:53pm.This is a summary of recent activity in the JumpBox Open Collection. News
Have questions, comments or suggestions, please let us know how we can help. Updated Production JumpBoxes
New Beta JumpBoxes added to the Proving Grounds
Updated Beta JumpBoxes in the Proving Grounds
Coming SoonSome updates that are almost ready for release.
That's all for this week. Thanks for supporting JumpBox. Kimbro Staken »
A fun JumpBox to play with the Google App Engine SDKSubmitted by kstaken on Thu, 04/10/2008 - 4:56pm.Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. We found this to be a pretty interesting system and since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it. It's a great solution if you want to play with the Google App Engine SDK without really installing it on your system. It's also perfect as an integration point for a small team working together on a Google App Engine project. Google made it possible to build applications for App Engine using several different mechanisms and the JumpBox comes with CGI, Google Webapp and Django environments setup and ready for development. It's also a really great way to just kick the tires of the different frameworks before committing to development. Also, since this is a JumpBox our backup system is included which allows you to backup your source code and development data to network shares or Amazon S3. The JumpBox for Google App Engine Development is just something we put together because it looked interesting, if people find it useful we'll continue developing it and tracking Google's SDK releases. I think there are a lot of things we could add to it to make it a really useful tool for developing apps. If you have any suggestions definitely let me know. »
Nagios & MySQL Betas available and Proving Grounds now publicSubmitted by sean on Wed, 04/02/2008 - 11:14am.We have two new beta JumpBoxes available in the Proving Grounds:
Both are based on the JumpBox platform 1.1 Beta and include all the great new enhancements described here.
Introducing JumpBox OpenSubmitted by sean on Tue, 03/25/2008 - 10:16am.
Think of it like this: if your time is worth $50/hr, a single JumpBox that saves you four hours today pays for the entire subscription. Then you have (Jeff Spicoli voice) "an ultimate set of tools" for the next year. Have a particular application you'd like to see added? Suggest it in the forums or via our contact form. We're committed to making great Open Source applications more accessible and the debut of JumpBox Open should be a great step towards that goal. Keep in mind that the $199.99 pricing is introductory though so take advantage of it while it lasts. »
What's new in the JumpBox Platform 1.1 BetaSubmitted by kstaken on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 11:54pm.With the recent release of the JumpBox for Redmine, the JumpBox Platform 1.1 Beta made its first public appearance. Since this is the first time we've publicly released the 1.1 Platform I wanted to provide a quick overview so that you can see the great stuff we've added. Redmine is the first application released on this Platform version, but there will be many others following over the next few months as we stabilize things and get the rest of the library updated. If you have feedback to offer on the 1.1 Platform, please post it in the Proving Grounds. So let's dive in. First off, we've updated to a newer version of Ubuntu Linux. Platform 1.0 JumpBoxes are based on Ubuntu 6.06 while Platform 1.1 is based on Ubuntu 7.10. This means there have been a large number of changes under the covers as many core tools have been updated to newer versions. Most of these changes won't be visible to the average JumpBox user, but some of the 6.06 tools were getting a little long in the tooth making it problematic to add some applications. Now, let's take a look at some of the new features added to the JumpBox administration interface. Our goal for the administration interface is to provide a basic set of tools to handle the common tasks that every application needs. Toward that end we've added a few new features to the admin interface and extended some of the existing features to have new options. I think there's some pretty interesting new capabilities opened up by the changes. Note: most of these features require a license key.
This is a screenshot showing the new admin interface. It looks more or less the same, but has picked up a few new icons.
A very common problem with 1.0 JumpBoxes has been getting them to send email. In many cases it just works out of the box, but at other times it can be restricted by the network on which the JumpBox is running. In those cases adding a relay host is a common fix so we added a very simple tool to help you do that. Nothing fancy about this, but we expect it to help a lot of people.
The JumpBox Backup system has gotten a big over haul in this release. In 1.0 you could backup to NFS and Windows file shares and in 1.1 you can still do that but we also added a few more options. First is a direct download option so that you just generate the backup and then save it to disk without configuring any kind of file share. That becomes a very easy way to grab the state of the JumpBox without having to set up any other infrastructure. The second new option is the ability to save backups into Amazon S3. This is a feature that we're really excited about, Amazon S3 is a great service where you pay by the GB to store data on Amazon's systems. It's very inexpensive and in just a few clicks you now have an option to backup your JumpBox to an offsite location. Very handy and a great addition to the JumpBox Backup system.
So seeing what's added for backups, it should be obvious that the restore system adds the mechanisms to do similar things in reverse. So you can restore from a file that you downloaded and you can restore from Amazon S3 as you would expect, however the restore system also gained another feature. You can import data directly from another JumpBox. This exists to make it easier to update to a new version of the JumpBox. Simply fire up the new JumpBox, point it at the old one and import the latest state. That makes the whole process much easier.
A completely new feature we added in 1.1 is an easy mechanism to enable SSL for the JumpBox. This is a great feature that allows you to setup encrypted connections using a self-signed certificate with just a couple clicks. Plus, it also gives you everything you need to get a properly signed certificate if you want to go through the extra steps. To use that option you'll need to get the certificate signed by a third party certificate authority, but the JumpBox does its best to help you along the way.
Since JumpBoxes pretty much always have web applications installed, it's a natural thing to want to see statistics for the web traffic that they're serving. So we made that easy. One click will activate the web stats package and show you how many people are using your JumpBox. There are also a few other nice capabilities like maintenance mode that allows you to turn the application off for maintenance, some nicer error messages for things like 404 errors and some general security and stability improvements behind the scenes. That's the quick overview of what's new in the JumpBox Platform 1.1. This is currently available in the JumpBox for Redmine and will be making it's way into JumpBoxes for other apps over the next few months. Of course this is a beta and we can really use some feedback, so if you try it out please share your experiences in the Proving Grounds. Latest application updates.Submitted by kstaken on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 4:40pm.It's been a busy few weeks around the JumpBox offices. With the recent launch of 6 new JumpBoxes, something that we haven't talked much about is the issuing of a bunch of updated JumpBoxes. So here's the list.
We also just released a greatly updated JumpBox for Redmine which contains the latest Redmine release, but is also the first public beta of the JumpBox Runtime version 1.1. This adds a number of handy new features to the JumpBox toolset. These changes will find their way into all the other JumpBoxes once we consider the 1.1 Runtime stable. Another post will coming to talk a little more about what's new in the 1.1 Runtime. »
The $19.99 JumpBox Blowout is BackSubmitted by kstaken on Tue, 02/19/2008 - 9:00am.It was hugely popular when we ran it in October, it's been eagerly awaited and now it's back. The $19.99 JumpBox Blowout. Yep, all JumpBoxes are just $19.99 per instance. And this time around it's better than ever as we have twenty different JumpBoxes to choose from. All with the same time saving JumpBox ease of use and built in management tools. So if there's been a JumpBox you've had your eye on, now's the time to grab it. Or better grab two or three or ten, I'm sure we won't mind. But hurry, this is only going to be around until Feb 29 at midnight MST and who knows when we'll be crazy enough to do it again. JumpBoxes are available for a great collection of applications and we're adding more all the time. »
Six new production JumpBoxes and now there are 20Submitted by kstaken on Tue, 02/12/2008 - 9:03am.We crossed a big milestone today with the release of 6 new production JumpBoxes.
With the addition of these applications there are now 20 different applications available as production JumpBoxes. »
Archive of the webinar with Virtual IronSubmitted by sean on Fri, 12/14/2007 - 4:18pm.If you missed the webinar we did with Virtual Iron earlier this week, there's an archived version available here. It's a 30min webex presentation with the first half explaining the virtualization piece (specifically Virtual Iron in this case) and the second half talking about the JumpBox piece with a full walk-through of the process setting up the Alfresco JumpBox start to finish. Big thanks to Chris Barclay and the folks at Virtual Iron for inviting us to participate. »
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The other exciting news is that we've opened the Proving Grounds up to the public. You'll notice there's now a link at the upper right corner of this site which takes you to our testing community. The Proving Grounds is the place where we make pre-release JumpBoxes available for testing before moving them to production status. We've got a ton of interesting candidates in the pipeline so be sure to check out the Proving Grounds for the latest and greatest.
We have some exciting news today- you can now get a 
