Landscape News

Today we released another version of Landscape, including new client packages. Highlights include important client fixes regarding package and process reporting and many enhancements for the server.

The client part of Landscape has two important fixes:

• “stuck” process information: the client was only sending updated process information to the server (for the process list page) whenever a process was added or removed. Other than that, existing processes were never updated regarding memory or cpu consumption, for example.
• improper handling of conflicting packages during upgrades: some upgrade scenarios which included conflicting packages were not handled properly, which could result in packages being removed ahead of time in the transaction. This has now been fixed in smart, which is the package manager tool used by Landscape.

These are the new client packages:

• landscape-client-1.0.13-landscape1
• smartpm-core-0.52-landscape11

For the server, we have:

• new “select upgrades” button in the package upgrade page: this button will automatically select only the latest version of the listed packages. Sometimes more than one upgrade will be listed, and if all are selected this will give a conflict.
• new dashboard: we now differentiate pending activities from the ones requiring approval in the summary
• better treatment of timeout errors in script execution: if a script execution failed due to a timeout, the activity would report as failed, but with no indication of why it failed.
• broken link in the packags page: unfortunately we had a link in that page still pointing to the old history pages, instead of the new activities one.
• other “under the hood” changes preparing some new features for the next versions

Thanks to all who gave us feedback about this version!

Today we released a new version of the Landscape server and client packages. This is an impressive release, with many server and client fixes and new features.

Client fixes (landscape-client-1.0.12-landscape1)

• the sleep average value of a process is no longer provided by recent kernels. The client now computes and sends the CPU usage instead.
• initial directory for script execution is now the target user’s home directory and, if that is unavailable, /. Previously it was /root.
• new user creation was ignoring some extra fields such as Location and phone numbers
• the machine uptime was incorrectly reported after a logrotate run and if there was no reboot afterwards. This affected the process listing page in the web interface, where processes would show up as having been started around 1970.

Server fixes

• error during password recovery it the typed passwords didn’t match
• if package upgrades and non-upgrades were selected at the same time, the non-upgrades were silently being discarded
• replaced “sleep average” column with CPU usage in the process list page since this information is no longer available in recent kernels
• more speed improvements for the process list page in the case of hundreds of processes and users
• user attributes can now also be removed/cleared via the web interface
• new user creation ignored the Location and Phone fields
• timezone changes for an admin didn’t affect all threads and sporadically the admin would see timestamps with the old timezone
• the message sent via landscape-message on the client was being truncated on the server. Now it is truncated only partially when viewed in a list, but the full message can be seen when clicking on the activity
• other internal fixes

New features

• new dashboard layout, with consolidated information about pending computers and activities
• possibility to perform searches on installed packages instead of having to resort to “all packages” or any other of the available choices

Thanks to all who provided feedback!