JumpBox Official Blog

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.

We’re hosting the first ever “JumpBox Study Hall” on Friday April 23rd 2pm PT and you’re invited.

This will be an hour-long interactive discussion in which we demonstrate various capabilities of JumpBoxes and field live Q & A from participants. The goals of the event are primarily to:

• Have synchronous interaction with our users
• Help answer people’s questions in real-time
• Trial this format of event to see if it makes sense to do on a monthly basis

And we’ll give away an annual Pro account subscription to one lucky participant at the end of the meeting (must be present to win). You can get the full details of the event and sign up to attend here.

We look forward to seeing and hearing many of our users for the first time!

It’s nearly two years to the day since we debuted the JumpBox library and today we’re extremely excited to unveil “Open Source as a service.” This is a new way to think about running your Open Source server applications. It allows you to treat them collectively as a utility combining the convenience of a SaaS-based offering with the unique advantage of being able to run your infrastructure on your terms. Run your apps in any hybrid configuration of of on-premise, in the cloud or in a data center. You now have all the power and flexibility of Open Source without the headaches. This is Open Source as a service.

Amongst the changes we’ve made is the introduction of Pro accounts and a monthly billing option to make it even easier for people to get started with JumpBox. Signing up for a Pro account gives you access to over fifty-five different applications in our library all available for a flat monthly fee with no usage restrictions. With applications that span all major categories such as collaborative business apps, development environments, communications infrastructure and network monitoring tools, this is a “software swiss army knife” for anyone coping with an array of IT challenges. The month-to-month option makes it easy for individuals to get started and for businesses that prefer annual subscription terms and access to support that option exists as well.

If you’re already acquainted with JumpBox and reading this in your RSS reader, stop by our site and see what’s new. We’ve quietly been adding some great new capabilities to the service lately like streamlining the way you can launch & manage your JumpBoxes on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment. We’ve also made enhancements to the way JumpBoxes run in EC2 so you can now take advantage of reserved instances (lower pricing by reserving computing time in advance) and EBS-backed instances (ability to shut down your JumpBoxes and bring them back while retaining the data).

OVF files for each JumpBox make deployment dramatically easier on platforms like VMware ESX & ESXi as well as VirtualBox. These are now available to monthly Pro subscribers.

Lastly, with the goal of making it even easier to try out the service we’ve added a two-week free trial so you can experience the benefits first-hand and risk-free. If you want a quick overview of how it all works, take a tour or start your free trial of a Pro account today.

Thanks to all our customers and users who have been providing invaluable feedback and helping sculpt the service to its current form. We have a ton of great enhancements slated for 2010 and we’re thrilled to have this opportunity to serve you and to continue to make this entire class of software more accessible and useful to a broader audience.

If you’re running multiple JumpBoxes there are some compelling reasons to centralize your authentication using the JumpBox for OpenLDAP:

• Convenience for you: You’ll have just one set of users to maintain. As you add more applications and more users to each over time the number of accounts to manage multiplies and becomes unwieldily. Having a single centralized directory keeps the complexity of account maintenance in check.
• Convenience for your users: Having centralized authentication means your users need only remember one set of credentials for all systems. If they change their password it propagates across all applications so there’s no more confusion caused by having to remember different login/password combinations for each.
• Less likelihood of rogue access credentials: Since there’s only one directory to maintain you can rest assured that removing a user from that system will revoke his/her privileges across all systems. This helps reduce the risk of having legacy orphaned accounts that linger in certain systems after employees leave.

If you’re sold on the value of centralized auth let’s make it happen! The video below demonstrates the full process (20min) of how to set up OpenLDAP integration amongst three different JumpBoxes: SugarCRM, KnowledgeTree and Redmine. Each application handles LDAP slightly differently so you’re integrating other apps you’ll need to research the app-specific documentation but this demo shows how to do it for these apps. And if you want to work alongside the tutorial you can use the widgets below to launch your own private instances. 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.

When we first created EC2 AMIs we provided public launch access to the free JumpBoxes for a brief period.  Later we changed how we handled AMIs but left these old AMIs public.  At this point, we think the presence of these year+ old AMIs in the public listing is doing more harm than good.  Leaving around one year old applications can leave unsuspecting users vulnerable.  Therefor we will be removing the public launch permissions on these AMIs this coming Sunday, February 28th, 2010.

The goal of this change is not to withdraw the availability of these images from people who may be relying upon them.  The change is intended to reduce confusion and avoid putting unsuspecting users into a bad position.  On a case by case basis we will consider granting launch access to users who need them.  Please contact JumpBox Support and provide your AWS ID and the AMI ID of the AMI you need access to.  Only non-dev pay AMIs that are currently publicly available are eligible.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Our team has been hard at work and it’s with great pride that we announce the availability of the much-anticipated JumpBox for Asterisk. Asterisk is self-described as “the world’s most powerful and popular telephony development tool-kit.” It’s a set of building blocks that allows one to construct phone-based applications. Components can be stacked together to build rich interfaces including functionality like a:

• VoIP Gateway
• Skype Gateway
• IP PBX
• Call Center ACD
• Conference Bridge
• IVR Server
• Voicemail System
• Call Recorder
• Fax Server
• Speech Server

The JumpBox for Asterisk bundles the popular Free PBX GUI for simplified administration as well as the Sipstation plugin for the quickest possible path to get up and running. Check out the screencast below for a ten minute primer on how to use it to make your first call to a real telephone. This is one of our subscriber-only JumpBoxes but you can try it immediately without a subscription using our Cloud Gear service. No upfront fees, nothing to download or install and you pay only pennies per hour to run it as long as you need. 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.