http://9while9.com provides a home for projects by faculty and high school students involved in Information Systems Management at the Chelsea School. Our focus is providing virtual appliances (for VMware and VirtualBox) and appliance ISOs.
We build virtual appliances as we write build notes in order to help us understand how to make patches that convert existing TurnKey Linux ISOs into the appliances we intend to produce. Our focus is on making FOSS resources available and accessible to academic institutions. However, we also work towards providing solutions that serve humanitarian interests - beyond education.
Sahana Eden Lite (Client Side)
We submit the patches to TurnKey Linux with the hopes that they'll be adopted and incorporated into the TurnKey Linux library. So far, we can celebrate that our Ampache, LimeSurvey, and Elgg appliances have been adopted. We're working toward completing appliances for the Ubuntu School in a Box blueprint, and toward that end have submitted appliances for education services including OpenSIS, Mahara, and IEP-IPP: read more about that endeavor here.
Sahana Eden (Lite) Appliance as a headless server
The goal is to provide access to server technologies that are preconfigured - obviating the need for an IT professional to get a service up and running. With the virtual appliances, the server solutions can be up and running simply by downloading VMware Player or VirtualBox OSE, downloading the appliance, and starting it up.
These virtual machines act and behave as physical machines on the network, yet there's no hardware footprint, no concerns about cooling or airflow, and less of a carbon footprint.
They're a perfect option for prototyping and exploring features, they provide new deployment opportunities, and they work well in both development and production environments.
