Landscape News

This release has a few enhancements for the new Alerts feature, a new plugin for landscape-sysinfo and some fixes. Read on for more details.

Alerts

Alerts have been enhanced with a new type of alert: security upgrades. It is now possible for an administrator to choose to only be notified when security upgrades are available.

The regular package upgrades alert will still include security upgrades, because they are still upgrades after all.

We also have a new alert details page which shows who is subscribed to each kind of alert and which computers are affected.

Other changes

• New disk plugin for landscape-sysinfo:

$ landscape-sysinfo
  System load: 0.0               Memory usage: 20%   Processes:       79
  Usage of /:  12.9% of 2.88GB   Swap usage:   1%    Users logged in: 1

  Graph these measurements at https://landscape.canonical.com

• fixed URL redirection when clicking on an invitation link while logged out from Landscape. After logging in, the user should automatically get the accept/decline invitation page instead of the dashboard
• accepting or rejecting pending computers now creates activities, which means these actions show up in the Activities page
• slightly better text for the “You are not yet a member of any account” error page, suggesting that this is the right time to click on the invitation link from the email

Thanks to all who submitted feedback for this release!

This week’s release brings many new exciting features to Landscape! We now have support for alerts, script attachments and more. Please read on for details.

Alerts

One of the main features of this development cycle has finally arrived: alerts!

We are very excited about this feature! It means the administrator will get alerts inside the web interface itself, and optionally emails. This means that Landscape can now warn you when something important requiring your attention happens!

These are the current types of alerts available:

• pending computer: whenever a new pending computer needs authorization to be accepted into Landscape
• updated packages: one or more managed machines have updates available
• activities waiting for authorization: for example, package upgrades that need to be approved

We have redesigned the dashboard to be more alert centric. Here is a screenshot showing two outstanding alerts:

Each alert can optionally be sent to the administrator’s email address. Here is how it is configured, in the new “Alerts” menu option:

So each administrator can choose to receive alert notifications via email or not.

We have more types of alerts being developed for future versions, stay tuned!

Script attachments

Script attachments are a complement to the already released “Stored scripts” feature. Now, not only can you store your most used scripts in the server, but they can also have attachments!

Here is the mandatory screenshot:

All the attachments are sent to the machines along with the script to be executed there, and are placed in a temporary directory so the script can easily access them. This opens up a whole lot of new possibilities. For example:

• change wallpapers
• install a program that is not packaged in the .deb format
• install new ssh keys or X509 certificates
• etc

Your imagination is the limit (and, well, the size of the attachments)

Sysinfo plugins

The client side has a new tool called “landscape-sysinfo”. Its idea is to provide a quick summary about the machine’s status regarding disk space, memory, processes, etc. Here is a sample run:

 $ landscape-sysinfo
  System load:  0.41   Swap usage:  3%     Processes:       176
  Memory usage: 30%    Temperature: 49 C   Users logged-in: 1

This tool is still in development, meaning it will be getting more and more plugins. Very soon it will be morphed into some sort of “message of the day” tool, that will show this small banner whenever an administrator logs in.

If you have suggestions about how this tool should behave, or what kinds of information it should display, please send us feedback!

Other fixes and changes

This release also brings in some fixes and other changes to Landscape. Here are some of the more relevant ones:

• duplicate CPU: multicore (SMP) systems running a Xen kernel will incorrectly report all processors as having an ID of 0 (zero), which was being rejected by the Landscape server;
• support cases: some people with support cases access were getting random errors logging them out of the session. This has been fixed.
• smart now allows a proxy to respond with cached data by not adding the “Pragma: no-cache” header to the HTTP request. This should improve the speed of package downloads for each client machine if a network proxy is in use.
• improved timestamp accuracy used for process killing on the client
• administrator invitations now expire

Thanks for all who have sent feedback, and keep it coming!