Landscape News

We are pleased to announce the availability of Landscape 1.4.0!

This version includes new features such as Eucalyptus cloud management and package activities sceduling as well as some polishing. Read on for details.

New features

In Landscape we always work at the same time in new features as well as in improving existing ones. Here are the new features for this release:

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Not only can Landscape interact with Amazon’s EC2 service, you can now use Landscape to handle instances in your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, based on Eucalyptus. All the features that work with EC2 also work with UEC, such as instance start/stop, Elastic Block Storage and others. All you need to do is provide the URL to the UEC endpoint and the cloud credentials:

UEC being defined

Scheduling

In this development cycle we started implementing scheduling in Landscape. For now, it’s only available for package activities and reboot and shutdown of computers, but expect this to be improved in the next few minor releases:

Scheduling a package activity

Access Groups

Access Groups allow us to restrict the computers to which selected administrators will have access to. Administrators that belong to an access group can only manage the machines in the same access group.

For example, if we had an access group called “devel”, administrators belonging to this group would only be able to manage the machines that also belonged to the “devel” group.

We want to make some last minute improvements to this feature, so it will only be available next week on November 2nd, 2009, but here is a sneak preview:

Preview of access groups

Ajax

It started small, with just a few icons showing the status of the EC2 instances in the computer page, but now we have Ajax all over the place in the user interface. This improves the user experience and makes Landscape faster and more robust.

Improvements

Landscape is always evolving, and we like to take care of existing features as well as introduce new ones. This time we paid considerable attention to packaging.

Package search

The package search page, which is central to all package activities, now uses a better search algorithm. Exact and more prominent matches are displayed first, and we got rid of the limitation of three characters at a minimum for a filter:

Improved search

Packaging User Interface

This has been in place already, but we would like to highlight it again. The new package interface can now handle upgrades, downgrades, new installations and removals all at the same time, in one place. Not only that, it also handles different versions of each package per computer and groups them all under the package name.

For example, before, when searching for a package called “postfix” among five different Ubuntu distributions, we would get one result for each version of “postfix”. Now it’s all grouped together under the “postfix” name, making the page much simpler to work with:

Dealing with four different versions of a package at the same time

Now a task like “install postfix on these four different Ubuntu machines” suddenly became much simpler: instead of 4 clicks (one for each version), it’s just one click away.

Today we completed another Landscape development cycle and released version 1.3. Even though we’ve released new point versions every two weeks, now is a good time to summarize what was accomplished and to announce the new features that are being made available today: EC2 support and Custom Graphs. Read on for details.

Cloud Computing: EC2 Support

Landscape 1.3 introduces support for Amazon’s EC2 service. Administrators can now start and stop EC2 Ubuntu instances from within Landscape itself. As part of the integration we offer, these instances will be automatically registered with Landscape so they can be managed right away.

An EC2 cloud in Landscape is basically a Amazon EC2 region (endpoint) associated with an Amazon account. So, one admin can usually register as many clouds as there are regions:

Instances can be started one at a time, or several at once:

Here are our features:

• automatic registration of EC2 instances: launch an instance and start managing it right away in Landscape;

• computer history preserved across instance termination: if it was stopped and started from within Landscape, it will be associated with the same computer

• unified view of instances: it doesn’t matter if one instance is in the US cloud and the other one in Europe. Landscape provides the administrator with an unified view allowing them to be managed together as usual

This is just the beginning: now that the feature is in place, we have many plans for it in the next development cycle. Stay tuned!

Custom Graphs

One of the frequent comments we get about Landscape is that there are too few graphs available to monitor aspects of managed machines. That’s somewhat true: we had to choose a few to start with.

But what other graphs should we add? Many suggestions have popped up: network bandwidth, database performance, web hits, etc. There is no way we could keep everyone happy. Or is there?

We believe Landscape 1.3 brings you what you asked for in the graphs area: customization. Instead of having to choose which new graphs to add, we went ahead and decided you should be able to plot whatever you want in Landscape. This is what we call Custom Graphs.

With Custom Graphs, all the administrator needs to do is write a script that will output a number:

Landscape takes care of periodically running this script on the machines you select and plots the results for you:

Note: the custom graphs feature needs a newer landscape-client package which is currently only available for Ubuntu 9.04 “jaunty” and EC2 instances deployed via Landscape. Client updates for the other Ubuntu distributions will be released shortly.

Knowledge Base

For quite some time now our technical support staff has been writing articles to help our customers through many tasks. These articles are references on to how to solve particular problems and are used all the time.

We decided to make them available to all Landscape customers and this is what we call the Knowledge Base.

There are hundreds of articles available covering dozens of topics:

And it’s searchable, of course:

This is all available to Landscape users, and new articles are being written all the time. Enjoy!

Other Changes and Improvements

During a development cycle we don’t work only on major new features, but also improve existing ones and fix existing bugs. Here are some of the things we also worked on during this cycle:

• alerts: new offline computer alert, tiggered whenever a managed machine stops contacting the Landscape server

• Launchpad Authentication: Landscape authentication is now integrated with Launchpad

• new theme for the Landscape web interface

• progress bar for activities, to give the administrator an idea about how the activity is progressing

New Release Cycle

Starting now, Landscape will undergo a new release cycle. Instead of having new deployments every 2 weeks, new versions will now be released every 4 weeks instead. This will help us in the planning and deployment of new features.

Thanks to all who sent feedback, comments, suggestions and complaints to the Landscape Team!

The latest Landscape deployment brings us a small but useful new feature: an alert for offline computers.

If a computer hasn’t talked to the Landscape server in the last 5 minutes, the offline computer alert will be triggered.

In the screenshot above, we do have this situation (it says “Alerted”), but the administrator chose to not subscribe to it (see the envelope icon), which means no email about this alert will be sent.

Computers can appear offline for a different number of reasons:

• network problems
• machine turned off
• landscape-client removed from the machine or not running

We believe this alert will be useful for many administrators out there.

Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback, and see you next time!

Today’s release of Landscape has a major new feature change in the authentication realm: we now use Launchpad to authenticate new Landscape users. Existing users are not affected. Read on for details.

New Front Page Detail

The first visible change is in the front page and affects all users: the password field is gone. This is what we have now:

Just type in your login e-mail as usual. What happens after that depends on whether you are an existing user, or a new user that just got an account.

Existing user accounts have not been migrated to Launchpad Authentication, but new users will start using the new authentication scheme.

Existing Users

Existing users are still using the standard authentication. So, after entering your e-mail at the front page, you will be prompted for your password as usual:

At some point in the future, all users will be migrated to Launchpad Authentication.

If you want, you can do your own migration right now. In your preferences page, you will see a new link which offers this option:

Click on it and follow the instructions to have your account migrated to Launchpad Authentication.

New Users

Users who get accounts in Landscape from now on will be using Launchpad Authentication from the beginning. It will start with the invitation process, which got a few more steps, but it’s all guided and shouldn’t present any problems. Just follow the instructions you get on screen.

These new users, or users who chose to migrate to Launchpad Authentication by themselves, will be presented with a different page after typing in their e-mail addresses in the front page:

Unfortunately, until bug #316796 is fixed, the email address will have to be typed in again. After supplying the correct password, the user will be logged in on Landscape.

This is a major change, and we apologize in advance for some confusion it might create. In the upcoming releases of Landscape we will probably be tweaking this process a bit here and there in response to feedback to try to make it as easy and transparent as possible.

Today we released Landscape 1.2. We have come a long way since the 1.1 release, with many new features that were incrementally added to the service in these last few months. So we will do something a bit different today in this blog post.

First we will recap what was accomplished in this 1.2 series, and then we will list what changed specifically in this last release.

Reviewing Landscape 1.2

Landscape 1.2 was mostly about customization. We wanted people to not be constrained and forced to use only specific features, but to be able to expand on their own.

The script library was the first such feature, allowing administrators to run scripts anywhere. Later it was incremented with attachments, giving administrators much more freedom. Being such a powerful feature, script execution is still disabled by default in the client part of Landscape, but it’s easily enabled during installation or afterwards.

Secondly, we wanted to make Landscape work more for the administrator. Instead of polling the Landscape pages to see what has to be done, what about letting Landscape warn you? This is how alerts were born. This feature was also later refined, allowing control over which set of machines are subjected to each type of alert.

Finally, we also wanted to make Landscape more useful for people without a subscription to the service. The idea was to provide a quick summary of the system during logins, so that an administrator could quickly check if everything was ok. landscape-sysinfo was born, and with a fully modular architecture it can be easily expanded with more plugins.

As a bonus, the client part of Landscape (including the new landscape-sysinfo tool) is officially part of Ubuntu starting with the 8.10 “Intrepid” release. This includes an integration with the installer, meaning that administrators can have a fully configured Landscape client right after installation.

Even with all these features being added to Landscape, there is always some time to fine tune existing ones and add some other, smaller, enhancements. Some are just small, but helpful, details, like adding a “Select All” button to a page. Others are a bit more visible, like the reboot/shutdown option. The point is that Landscape is always evolving. One day things are exactly how they were before, and in the next day the administrator can be presented with a new exciting feature that makes his job easier.

To end this quick review, here is the full list of major features that were added to Landscape 1.2:

• Alerts: via email or just in the dashboard, get alerts for package upgrades (security or otherwise), new pending computers or pending actions that require explicit approval from the administrator;
• Script library: administrators can now store scripts inside Landscape itself for quick retrieval and deployment. Attachments can also be stored and used from within the script, opening up lots of new scripting possibilities;
• System status during login: new client side tool called landscape-sysinfo which shows a quick summary about the system where the administrator is logging in (only available for text logins, such as a terminal or ssh);
• Inclusion in Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid”: not only is the client part of Landscape part of the distribution, there is also integration with the installer.

Thanks to all that sent feedback to the Landscape team, it is really appreciated!

Specific changes for this release

These are the specific changes in this release compared to the previous one:

• client fix to avoid a situation where dpkg would stop asking for a question, thus halting the whole package operation
• fix for a server error when an activity would be cancelled when it was no longer undelivered
• set and export a sane PATH variable for scripts
• set secure flag on cookies so they are only sent over an https connection
• set a limit for the number of pending computers

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!

Landscape now offers a script library for admins to store their scripts and also a new plugin to allow for easy and quick reboots or shutdowns of managed machines. Read on for more details!

Script library

Admins can now store their scripts in Landscape itself. So, when sending a script to a collection of machines, you have the option of recalling it from the library:

Here you can manage your existing scripts and add new ones:

Reboots and Shutdowns

We know that managed machines can be rebooted or powered off via script execution, but that would require the plugin to be enabled on all machines and some sudo setup, or allowing root to run scripts.

There is an easier way: the new landscape-client packages  have a new plugin to allow easy reboot or shutdown via Landscape. This plugin is enabled by default. In the web interface, the new option is available under “Info”, and, as is usual with Landscape, can be applied to any number of machines at once:

Other changes

Besides the new features, we also had a few bugfixes:

• scripts with accents in them are now handled correctly
• accented characters were causing problems in several pieces of the web interface and have been fixed
• fixed some dbus errors in Ubuntu 6.10 LTS (”dapper”)
• a few changes to the how-to-register document which explains how to register a new Landscape client
• other internal changes in preparation for even more new features, stay tuned!

Thanks again to all who provided feedback!

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!