JumpBox on Amazon EC2 BetaSubmitted by kstaken on Tue, 06/24/2008 - 12:15amWe're happy to introduce the ability to run JumpBoxes on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 can be thought of as a big virtualization system in the internet cloud that you pay for by the hour. So instead of running a JumpBox on your hardware you use Amazon's hardware and just pay for what you need. It's a really interesting system for all kinds of different uses. I highly encourage reading more about EC2 and it capabilities and limitations. One growing use for EC2 is as a very flexible hosting system. You can think of it as roughly equivalent to virtual private server hosting but with a number of key differences. First is that it's much more flexible, you can launch as many instances as you want and you're just billed by the hour for the time they're actually running. The down side is that EC2 is a little more expensive than low end VPS services and you have to be very aware of how EC2 handles disks and to make sure you backup regularly (see the links above for more detail on this). Fortunately using a JumpBox makes this easy by allowing you to backup to Amazon's Simple Storage Service. Today we're releasing four JumpBox AMIs as a beta test of our support for the Amazon EC2 system.
These are currently available as public AMIs on the Amazon system so if you have an Amazon EC2 account you should be able to launch them using any tool that can launch EC2 instances. If you don't have an Amazon EC2 account you can easily signup for one using any Amazon account. These public AMIs are just a test. When we roll out the full collection to EC2 it's planned for the full set to be exclusive to JumpBox Open subscribers at the Plus level and above. Important: In order to use a JumpBox AMI you must ensure that ports 22, 80 and 3000 are accessible. You may either add these ports to an existing EC2 Security Group or you may create a new security group to use when launching JumpBox instances. No other ports need to be made accessible in a default JumpBox. The easiest way to launch EC2 instances is to use ElasticFox a Firefox extension for managing EC2 instances. If you use ElasticFox you can find the JumpBoxes in the list of available AMIs by sorting by manifest and looking for manifests that begin with jumpbox-amis/. From there you just have to setup your security group to allow the ports listed above and can launch as many JumpBox instances as you'd like. Just be aware that Amazon changed by the hour for every instance that you launch so make sure you don't forget and leave something running that you didn't intend to. JumpBoxes for Cacti, MediaWiki, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Bugzilla updated to JumpBox Platform 1.1Submitted by kstaken on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 5:37amWe're happy to announce that six more JumpBoxes have been updated to the new JumpBox Platform 1.1. Here's a quick overview of the changes in this new platform. All updated JumpBoxes inherit these capabilities.
We'll be publishing much more information on this new platform in the coming weeks as we work on getting all the existing JumpBoxes updated. Updated Production JumpBoxesFor all of these the only change is the update to the new JumpBox Platform.
Thanks for supporting JumpBox and as always, feel free to send us feedback. Six new JumpBoxes and an updated JumpBox PlatformSubmitted by kstaken on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 5:02amHello, We're happy to announce the availability of six new JumpBoxes based on the JumpBox Platform 1.1. These are the first production releases made on this new and considerably improved platform. Here are just a few of the things that have changed with this platform revision.
We'll be publishing much more information on this new platform in the coming weeks as we work on getting all the existing JumpBoxes updated. Other News
New Production JumpBoxes
New Production JumpBoxes - Exclusively Available to JumpBox Open Subscribers
Thanks for supporting JumpBox and as always, feel free to send us feedback. Kimbro Staken New Releases and Get 10% off JumpBox Open Subscriptions until May 16Submitted by kstaken on Tue, 05/13/2008 - 12:46amHello, We're happy to announce the production release of the JumpBox for Moodle and to celebrate, we're offering 10% off JumpBox Open Subscriptions. That's 21 JumpBoxes, all for a single price, and the value just keeps growing as we release new applications. To take advantage of this offer use the following coupon during checkout. Coupon code: MOODLE-LAUNCH-PROMO This offer ends at midnight PST on May 16. That's only a few days away. Moodle is a very popular course management system used by educators around the world to create learning communities for their students. This JumpBox was a popular request so we're thrilled to add it as the newest member of the JumpBox Open Collection. Now on with our regularly scheduled summary of update activity in the Open Collection. News
New Production JumpBox
Updated Production JumpBoxes
Updated Beta JumpBoxes in the Proving Grounds
That's all for this week. Thanks for supporting JumpBox and as always, feel free to send us feedback. Kimbro Staken New Releases for 5/01/08Submitted by kstaken on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 1:50amHello, 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 - 1:53pmThis 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 - 4:56pmGoogle 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. What's new in the JumpBox Platform 1.1 BetaSubmitted by kstaken on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 11:54pmWith 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 - 4:40pmIt'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 - 9:00amIt 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.  |
JumpBox Open Collections
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