Integrum Technologies a Ruby on Rails consulting house and home of Gangplank ran into a little trouble with their network and found the JumpBox for Cacti just what they needed to get it resolved.
Have you ever used a JumpBox to solve an unusual problem? If so we’d love to hear about it.
It’s like a reverse Agatha Christie novel – the numbers are going up instead of down! Today our newest team member Steven joins us to help hone our marketing message and tell a better story for JumpBox. Steven’s trading card reads as follows:
A self-proclaimed social media junkie and technology freak, Steven brings enthusiasm and a fresh marketer’s perspective to the team. Formerly in his spare time Steven raced go karts and shredded mountains on a snowboard. He now dedicates his attention entirely to his wife, two children and web-based technology.
We’re excited to have Steven involved and helping us translate the sometimes abstract concepts and features involved into meaningful benefits for our users. Welcome aboard Steven!
So here at work, we’re in the process of developing a new web site for our subscribers. We’ve decided to implement the site atop the SilverStripe Content Management System, as we’ve found it to be incredibly flexible and easy to use. It’s based on a powerful MVC framework that’s written in PHP. We develop mostly on Mac OS X, which includes PHP5 pre-installed, so therefore it should be easy to install, right? Wrong!
Want to install SilverStripe? Sure, drop it in place, it’s just a directory structure, but when you try to access the main page, which generally results in SilverStripe attempting to perform its initial setup, you’re Denied!
Why? Well, first of all, SilverStripe requires MySQL… Not included by default on Mac OS X. So I had to install that. I also had to install the MySQL Admin and MySQL Query tools so that I could create the default SilverStripe database and properly set up its permissions.
Next, SilverStripe requires the GD2 PHP extension. Unfortunately, Mac OS X’s PHP installation includes absolutely none of the common PHP extensions. Have one of the thousands of PHP apps that want to use the PHP SOAP extension out of the box? Can’t! Yep, I found that one out while I was trying to do PHP development using the EC2 SOAP APIs.
Should be easy enough to compile the GD2 extension and install it, right? No Way! Building GD2 from a standard PHP download requires a bunch of dependencies that aren’t installed by default on Mac OS X, and then when you finally do get it built and add it to your PHP.ini, it still doesn’t work. So how about MacPorts? Why should I have to install PHP from MacPorts if PHP is already installed?! Even worse, I’d have to reconfigure Apache to use the MacPorts PHP5 install instead of the default. Bleck!
Long story short, I wasted over an hour of my time trying to get the Mac OS X PHP install to bend to my will with absolutely no luck. Then I realized something. I work for JumpBox… We actually have a JumpBox for SilverStripe. It took me about ten seconds to download the JumpBox, another ten to uncompress the Zip file, and yet another ten seconds to start up the SilverStripe VM. After that, I had to fill out a couple of fields for the initial setup, and was good to go. Yes, people, it took under a minute to get a working SilverStripe system up and running.
Even better, instead of having to go through the headache of installing SilverStripe, MySQL, and the missing Mac OS X PHP extensions all over again on my MacBook (so that I can work at home, of course), all I had to do was suspend the VM, copy the JumpBox for SilverStripe folder onto my 5gb thumb drive and throw it in my pocket. Try doing that with your average everyday install.
It was clear from the last survey we conducted that we haven’t done a spectacular job publicizing the JumpBox Rewards Program (many respondents weren’t aware it existed). This is a referral program available to all customers who recommend the Open to a friend. It’s explained in detail here but basically during the checkout process for an Open, your friend puts your email address into the referral field and you earn $50 in cash that’s paid to you at the end of each quarter (refer just four people and you’ve recouped the cost of your own subscription – any referrals beyond that is money in your pocket).
There are some conditions that apply so if you want to participate be sure to read those first. But the concept is simple: we appreciate the people who help us spread the JumpBox gospel and we believe the clearest way to reward them for their efforts is via cash. Post a comment here if you have any questions about how this program works.
Over the last couple weeks we’ve released a large number of updated JumpBoxes. There were two critical security issues detected in PHP and Python for which fixes have been incorporated into these updated releases. Updating is recommended for all users.
The following JumpBoxes have been updated: Moin Moin, OpenLDAP, Trac, Cacti, vTiger, TikiWiki, SugarCRM 4.5.x, Silverstripe, PMWiki, MySQL, Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x, Enterprise Wiki, Moodle, MediaWiki, Mantis, PunBB, Joomla 1.0.x, phpBB, DokuWiki, Wordpress
Note: if you’ve downloaded any of these in the past week you may already have the updated version so check the JumpBox version number.
There are a few application updates we wanted to highlight as well. These also incorporate the latest platform fixes.
SugarCRM is a market leading customer relationship management (CRM) application. SugarCRM’s open source architecture easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications.
Updated to SugarCRM 5.0.0g which is a regular maintenance release. (SugarCRM 5 release notes)
Project Pier is an Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done.
This release has been updated to ProjectPier 0.8.0.3 which contains a few minor bug fixes. (ProjectPier release notes)
MoinMoin is an advanced, easy to use and extensible Wiki Engine with a large community of users. It’s written in Python and has a clean easy to understand user interface. Since it’s a Python program it’s not one of the most popular wikis, but that’s a shame as it has a very clean interface and is a very powerful tool for documentation projects. This makes the JumpBox for MoinMoin even more valuable, because it allows us to expose this great Wiki system to more users who we believe will find it quite valuable.
Updated to MoinMoin 1.7.1 which fixes a number of bugs. (MoinMoin release notes)
Joomla! is arguably the world’s most popular open source content management system for public facing web sites. Joomla 1.5 is a ground-up rework of the Joomla 1.0 code base moving it to a true MVC architecture.
Updated to Joomla 1.5.5 which is a maintenance release that fixes several bugs and some security issues. (Joomla 1.5.x release notes)
This is probably sacrilege to admit amongst IT professionals but I DESPISE the command line. For someone who grew up using a mouse in a GUI environment, it’s a daunting proposal to be told to SSH into a Linux machine and edit a bunch of stuff in VI. ”CAT the file, TAIL the log, GREP it, CHOWN the permissions” – I can talk the jargon but when it comes to executing these commands to do something useful, well…
That doesn’t mean us GUI people don’t want to use applications that run on Linux though. The fact a JumpBox lets anyone manage a linux-based application entirely via GUI is something that is hugely attractive to those of us who fear the command line. While many of the common administration tasks are currently manageable via web-based tools, the reality is that there are still times when one needs to manually add or edit individual files within a JumpBox (ie. installing modules and themes in Wordpress or Drupal).
People of the mouse: fear not. There is a simple graphical-based way to achieve this. The big disclaimer here though is that you can screw things up when you start editing files under the hood. As always, before attempting something that has destructive potential, make a backup first. Once you’ve done that, follow this quick 4-step tutorial to see how you can edit files sans command line:
