JumpBox Official Blog

Here’s the latest addition to the library, presenting: The JumpBox for Drupal 7. This is the latest point release of the popular Drupal CMS platform and they’ve made some impressive improvements to the usability of it. Other major notable enhancements include:

• Ease of Use The administration UI has been reworked to provide a much more intuitive interface for accomplishing tasks. Modules & themes can now be installed directly via remote URL.
• ScalabilityThey’ve made various optimizations to improve the performance giving you visitors faster load times and giving your site the ability to handle greater load.
• Power & Flexibility You can now add custom fields to anything and the set of most useful & commonly installed themes are included in the core download

Here’s an excellent presentation that gives a summary of the improvements in Drupal 7. Check the video below for a 7min overview of how to start building your first site using this software. We’ll cover the basics of setting a new theme, adding some content, investigating the different content types and how to install modules that extend the functionality of your CMS. When you’re ready to play use the launch widget below to launch your own private instance on EC2. Enjoy!

*Tip: To view video at full-resolution in hi-def, make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the screen.

We’ve just added the capability to choose how much computing power to assign the JumpBoxes you launch on Amazon EC2 via our graphical interface. Until now if you’ve wanted to launch on EC2 and use an instance size other than small, you’ve had to use the AWS Console or a third-party tool like Elastic Fox. Not anymore. You can now use the simplified GUI we offer to one-click launch your instances and designate where you run it and how much computing power to assign it. Check out the instructions for using the Cloud widget on our wiki.

This is useful as it allows you to take advantage of the AWS pricing for microinstances on JumpBoxes that support will the smaller instance size. It also allows you to go the other way and easily scale up and take advantage of the greater computing power afforded by the High-CPU Medium instance size if your application is getting hammered. It is important to note that not all JumpBoxes will run as microinstances. The rule of thumb is that typcially the non-Java applications will work fine but the larger Java-apps (denoted by download sizes of about double of the others) have higher resource requirements and therefore need at least the small instance type.

One other aside for folks trying to cut their hosting costs- be sure to investigate reserved instances on AWS. This allows you to cut your costs by up to 1/3rd by locking in a usage commitment in advance. All JumpBoxes may be run as reserved instances but for now doing so requires that you use either the AWS Console or a tool like Elastic Fox.

If you’re using the Cloud widget now to launch instances, let us know how it’s working and what other capabilities you’d like to see.

A number of people have been asking for an updated JumpBox for Joomla 1.6 to include the 1.6 GA release. We have been working on this update but unfortunately our testing of the 1.6 GA release has revealed a rather serious bug in Joomla that prevents the installation of  any kind of extension when FTP is used. Since installing extensions is a rather important feature for Joomla we’re holding the update to the JumpBox until a fix is released.

If you’re curious, more detail on the issue that is holding up the release can be found in this bug report. Hopefully we’ll have a fix from the Joomla project before too much longer.

We have recently made some changes to how we make all of the JumpBoxes.  Starting this week we have been releasing the 1.6 series of JumpBoxes.  This series contains the following changes:

• All JumpBoxes now have three disks.
• JumpBoxes now use the generic-pae kernel.
• Non-VMware Disks and configuration files have been removed.
• Still based on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS, since 1.5.0.

While these changes do end JumpBox compatibility with some virtualization platforms, I think it will make importing the JumpBox better supported platforms a little less confusing by reducing the possible options.  Users will not longer have to figure out how to best import a JumpBox, they will simply have to rely on importing either our standard VMX or OVFs downloads.  Many of the modern platforms now support import of VMX and OVF based virtual appliances.

The main thing we lose is compatibility with old platforms that do not support PAE, this includes at least Parallels 3 and MS Virtual PC 2007.  However, using this PAE kernel means the JumpBoxes can run with more than 4GB of allocated RAM and serves as a workaround for an issue with ESX 4.1 compatibility.

With these changes in mind, JumpBox compatibility is as follows:

• Works as Native Platform
  • VMware Fusion
  • VMware Player
  • VMware Server
  • VMware Workstation
  • VMware ESX
  • Amazon EC2
• Works through VMX Import
  • Parallels Desktop
  • Parallels Server
• OVF Has been known to work
  • VirtualBox
  • Citrix XenServer (Possible)
• Can be Made to Work With Effort
  • Parallels Workstation (Not too hard)
  • KVM
  • QEMU
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Xen Open Source Linux (HVM)
• Unknown, Deprecated, No Longer Supported
  • Microsoft Virtual Server (No Longer Supported)
  • Microsoft Virtual PC (No Longer Supported)
  • Virtual Iron (No Longer Supported)
  • Sun xVM Server
  • Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
  • OpenVZ
  • Parallels 3 (No Longer Supported)
  • Any other platform that doesn’t support PAE kernels

We will continue to evaluate how best to serve our users.  We hope to eventually officially support Hyper-V with a VHD based image.  But any future compatibility releases will be made in the form of an alternative download rather than by modifying the VMX based image.

I have updated the JumpBox Compatibility Chart.

We recently announced a partnership with OnApp. Their software enables hosting providers to essentially offer their own EC2-like cloud system complete with the ability for their customers to self-provision JumpBoxes and pay on a per-usage basis.

“The combination of OnApp’s highly configurable cloud hosting engine, and JumpBox’s ‘ready to use’ web applications, makes it simple for hosting providers to deploy and manage the applications their customers need,” said Carlos Rego, MD of OnApp. “With more than 50 JumpBox applications available today, a low monthly fee, and OnApp’s unique approach to cloud hosting, our clients can expand the services they offer in a very quick and cost-effective way.”

OnApp is offering this software free for the first year (or until you reach 100 CPU cores).

If you’re a hosting provider seeking to offer JumpBoxes to your customers in a self-provisioned fashion, this is worth investigating. Go here to book your personalized demo with an OnApp representative or read more about how it works.

Here’s the latest addition to the library, presenting: The JumpBox for Elgg. Elgg is a social networking platform in a box – think of it like your own private, white label Facebook. It has many of the same concepts including friends, groups and an activity stream. There are a handful of widgets available for it which enable features such as:

• Blogs: write posts that are shared amongst specific groups for friends
• Twitter: integrate your Twitter account so Elgg bi-directionally aggregates your Tweets and flows Elgg posts out via your Twitter stream.
• Wire posts: post sitewide notifications that are available regardless of group membership.
• Flexible notifications: customize your email notifications so you receive update messages based on activity amongst certain groups or friends.

In this 6min video we’ll cover the basics for setting up an on-premise social network using the JumpBox for Elgg. We’ll do a basic orientation covering the fundamental concepts of friends, groups, the dashboard and changing basic configuration settings. By the end you should have what you need to get started building your own private social network for your organization.

*Tip: To view video at full-resolution in hi-def, make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the screen.

In case you missed our 2nd “Virtual Study Hall” webinar earlier today, there’s a screen capture of the call available below. We had a solid line-up of delegates from various Open Source projects as well as Amazon showing us their latest & greatest. You can get the full hour-long event available in HD video as well as an audio-only option (the annoying audio echo goes away after the first minute). You can subscribe to this feed in your iTunes if you’d like to download future audio captures automatically. And there’s a time-stamped index of the topics we covered.

Given all the feedback from participants that attended we’ll continue doing these webinars on a monthly basis. You can ask questions about anything in the video via the comments section of this blog. If you’re looking to get more “surface area” not just with us but with the Open Source projects as well, these webinars provide a great opportunity for real-time interaction that enables this.

Skim through the video below to learn more about the latest from Mindtouch, Amazon Web Services, Redmine, OTRS & Canonical. Congrats to the winners of the annual Pro account giveaway and many thanks to all our presenters who took time out of their day to share information with us. RSVP now if you’d like to attend the next webinar.

*Tip: To view video at full-resolution in hi-def, make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the screen.

Our friends in Asia and the Southwest Pacific area will be happy to learn that it’s now possible to deploy EC2-based JumpBoxes closer to home. All JumpBox Pro & Business customers starting today will see the option to deploy into the recently announced AWS datacenter in Singapore.

If you’re located in this area and are already running a JumpBox in the US or Europe regions you can take advantage of our migration mechanism to move your instance to the Singapore datacenter. You’ll need to first bring up a new JumpBox on EC2 in Singapore and then follow the instructions available here on our wiki.

Running your instances closer to home should enhance usability with faster response times and more reliable network connectivity. If you’re not currently a Pro customer but would like to test the responsiveness of Singapore-based instances sign up for a free trial now.

In an effort to make our service more accessible to those organizations who are most affected by IT budget cuts, we’re announcing the immediate availability of a discount policy on annual plans for schools, non-profits and government organizations. We know IT budgets are tight all around right now and these organizations are particularly feeling the pinch. This policy is intended to make it more affordable for these entities to gain the benefits of our service. Here’s how to take advantage of the savings:

Visit this page. If you have an email address from one of the above top-level domains you’re automatically qualified. If you have an alternative email but believe you’re eligible, simply include a note explaining the circumstances and we’ll manually approve your request.

We strive to keep our service affordable for those companies that need it most. With a yearly flat-fee access to a comprehensive library of over 55 different ready-to-run pieces of Open Source IT infrastructure, a JumpBox account is a great asset for any organization. If you’re ready to take advantage of the discount apply now. We look forward to helping you leverage the value of Open Source for your cause.

We’re proud to present the newest addition to the library today: The JumpBox for OpenVPN. If you have a distributed work force, are looking to offer telecommuting capabilities to your employees or simply want a solution for accessing the contents of your office network from the road, the JumpBox for OpenVPN is your answer. From the OpenVPN about page, noteworthy “S’s” of using OpenVPN include:

• Security: OpenVPN’s security model is based on using SSL/TLS for session authentication and the IPSec ESP protocol for secure tunnel transport over UDP.
• Stability: If the IP layer goes down for 5 minutes, when it comes back up, tunnel traffic will immediately resume even if the outage interfered with a dynamic key exchange which was scheduled during that time.
• Scalability: Configure a scalable, load-balanced VPN server farm using one or more machines which can handle thousands of dynamic connections from incoming VPN clients,.
• Simplicity: OpenVPN is an extensible VPN framework which has been designed to ease site-specific customization, such as providing the capability to distribute a customized installation package to clients.
• Standards: OpenVPN has been built with a strongly modular design. All of the crypto is handled by the OpenSSL library, and all of the IP tunneling functionality is provided through the TUN/TAP virtual network driver.
• Speed: OpenVPN achieved a send/receive transfer rate of 1.455 megabytes per second of CPU time running Redhat 7.2 on a Pentium II 266mhz machine, using TLS-based session authentication, the Blowfish cipher, SHA1 authentication for the tunnel data, and tunneling an FTP session with large, precompressed files.

In this 12min video we’ll use the JumpBox for OpenVPN to bridge two disparate home networks and then use VNC to take control of a remote computer across the VPN. We’ll launch the OpenVPN JumpBox on Amazon EC2 and establish a temporary cloud-based VPN to conduct remote tech support (with someone who is quite possibly the world’s least-technical person .

Having a dormant, pre-configured OpenVPN JumpBox in EC2 gives you a simple, cost-effective mechanism to deliver remote tech support on demand. This JumpBox allows you to make remote resources appear local so there are many other interesting use cases it enables. You can work along with the video by launching an instance of your own using the widget below. Enjoy!

P.S. Make sure to join us this Friday for the first ever “Study Hall” where we’ll show undocumented features and answer live Q & A from attendees. You’ll have a chance to win a free annual Pro account by attending and we’ll take the first 30 signups. Details here.

*Tip: To view video at full-resolution in hi-def, make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the screen.