Snap!

On our Beta FAQ page we briefly discuss "rubberbands". Rubberbands are mini-components which link different components available from our component library either to the Elastic Server's management framework (which we call Wrapture), or too each other.

We are still working out some final details of the formats needed for linking to the web-based control panel services tab, logging tab and soon forthcoming firewall tab.

BUT...our objective is get these published ASAP, along with your ability to make them part of the overall component library.

For a simple first example build an Apache2 server - and look in the front tab of the control panel. You will now see the Apache server listed and have ability to start/stop it from there.
We have built this rubberband into the package for now.

Incidentally - this rubberband i s about 4 lines of XML.

What about interesting links between 2 components? Like maybe a gateway link which captures things off of ActiveMQ topics and publishes them to AMQP topics?

As you might guess this is a bit more complicated but we anticipate some interesting usage of Spring AOP to enable some of this. On that topic - more to follow as well.

What the heck is cft-crutch?

You may have noticed on your Dashboard page under "Popular Packages" the packages cft-rubymin-default and cft-crutch. Although you didn't pick these for inclusion in your server we automatically include them for now.

The package cft-rubymin-default is the code and scripts which make up our Wrapture Manageability Framework. Wrapture is the product name for the functions inside the Elastic Server virtual machines which allow the VM to be managed via a web browser or via access to the Wrapture SOAP API.

The package cft-crutch is what we call a "meta-package" foe grouping features together for installation in an Elastic Server. This meta-package will be in all of our Beta builds and also all developer builds. It contains utilities which are useful for development and testing.

These utilities are:
openssh-server
rsync
ftp
less
busybox
zip
port 22 open

We would love to hear your thoughts on what other developer utilities you would like to have choice of incorporating in your Elastic Servers.

Port 80 Lives!

We have released port 80 in Elastic Servers from its temporary captivity. Your port 80 components, you know like APACHE, now work fine.

Our web-based control panel is now accessed at the IP address of your server at port 2999.

Ouch - We ate port 80!

Quick note on our beta - we ate port 80! As we migrated our Elastic Server On-Demand access ports from our testing ports to port 80 in production - we also moved our web-based control panel inside the Elastic Servers we build to port 80 too. Doh! We will make a patch soon so that the admin console will be on a less intrusive ports for those of you building Elastic Servers with components that use port 80 by default. Thanks.