Landscape News

Today we have deployed new versions of both the server and the client packages. Important changes and fixes include the way we deal with network users, errors reporting packages to the server and an end of life announcement for Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) Landscape packages.

These are the new client packages:

• landscape-client-1.0.11-landscape1
• smartpm-core-0.52-landscape10 and smartpm-0.52-landscape10

The important changes are:

• the Landscape client will no longer list network users. This means that users that come from LDAP, NIS or even Windows will not be listed anymore. The client will only show, and manage, users present in local system files such as /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group.
• the process list page in the web interface is now much faster, specially when dealing with a large number of processes
• the “smart update” command that is run hourly via cron on the client could get stuck sometimes, preventing clients from collecting and uploading package data
• fix for a crash in smart caused by malformed lines in /etc/fstab
• some smaller UI improvements on the server side

This is also the last release for which we will provide “Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy)” client packages. This version of the distribution is no longer supported or maintained and mirrors do not even carry its packages anymore.

Thanks to all who sent feedback!

Today’s deployment marks the release of Landscape 1.1!

New activities infrastructure

The history system has been replaced by a simpler and more powerful activity system.   This is a significant change that has affected many parts of Landscape.  The new system is used to manage change requests and notices for computers and accounts.  For example, when an administrator performs an action, such as requesting package upgrades for a selection of computers, an activity is created to request that each computer report available upgrades.  If any of the computers have packages available to upgrade, the client reports them to the server.  The server creates an activity to represent each package installation or removal that must be performed to complete the upgrade.

Landscape won’t install package upgrades without explicit permission. The package installation and removal activities will be unapproved and require manual approval before Landscape will make the changes.  The pending activities section on the dashboard, account and computer info pages will help you keep on top of activities that need your attention.

While many activities are requests, such as in this example, activities may also be notifications of events occurring on computers and within accounts.  We’ve migrated data from the old history system to work with the activities system.  Active commands or operations from the old system will be handled seamlessly.  The new summary pages make it easy to see account activity.

We hope you enjoy the new activity system!

Fast graph generation

Performance bottlenecks in graph generation logic have been optimized.  Graphs that used to take minutes to generate now take seconds!

Other improvements

A new landscape-client package, version 1.0.8-landscape1, has been released with fixes that avoid reporting duplicate groups and ensure that package tasks don’t interfere with each other.  The server now accurately records primary group changes reported by the clients and processes user and group messages much more quickly.

We hope you enjoy the new features!