Landscape News

Even though we believe Landscape is very intuitive to use, we also realize documentation is essential. The Landscape Team has been updating a documentation wiki for a while now, and it’s time to make it a bit more public.

Please visit https://help.landscape.canonical.com. This wiki is being constantly updated and we hope it will be useful to existing and new users. At some point in the future we will add direct links to some specific sections from within Landscape itself.

A note for Firefox-3.5 and Google Chrome users: the certificate the wiki site presents is a wildcard certificate for *.canonical.com, which, in those browsers, doesn’t match help.landscape.canonical.com. That’s why you will get a security warning.

We got a few screen casts to show you which explain some of the basic features of Landscape. Here they are:

Introduction to Landscape

A short presentation of the main features of Landscape and how it can help you reduce costs and save time by automating many of the time consuming tasks of managing your Ubuntu systems.

Landscape client registration

Landscape script execution

Landscape package management

A narrated walk through of the process of finding and installing Ubuntu packages using Landscape. This video presents a good introduction of how to execute this basic task in Landscape and gives a nice overview of the UI.

The latest Landscape release includes a brand new feature: Knowledge Base! Read on for details

Knowledge Base Articles

Landscape now has inside it hundreds of Knowledge Base articles created by our Support Team to document common scenarios and customer issues with Ubuntu. They are accessible via the left menu:

The article database is searchable, meaning you can quickly find an article to help you. Here, for example, we searched for winbind:

Enjoy!

This release of Landscape brings in some enhancements to alerts and scripts attachments, as well as a few other fixes. Read on for details.

Attachments

How often do you mention in an email that an attachment was added, only to forget to attach it before sending? Thankfully, many email clients nowadays detect this situation and try to remember you.

Well, Landscape can now do the something very similar for scripts! If you attach one or more files to a script but don’t use them in the code, Landscape will warn you.

Alert subscriptions

We added a visual clue about alert email subscriptions in the alerts page, so that people can easily see if they are subscribed to them or not without having to click on each rule:

If you see an envelope icon with a red forbidden sign on it, it means you will not get an email if the alert is triggered. That is the case of the last rule in the screenshot above (alert about activities that need approval). In that example, the current administrator is subscribed to all the other rules and will get an alert via email whenever they are triggered.

Other changes

• Tags without computers are now also shown under the Computer icon in the sidebar. Additionally, the number of computers to which each tag is assigned is also shown.
• Sometimes the server would send repeated resynchronization requests, even while one was still underway. Administrators would see several such requests in the Activities page, sometimes just minutes apart. This has been fixed.
• If editing an user that no longer existed, the server would yield an error. This could happen, for example, if the user was deleted and this information was just being updated on the server while the user edit page was still open. This has been fixed.

There have been other changes under the hood for two new exciting features we have almost ready in Landscape. Stay tuned, because they are almost ready to go live.

This release brings a new user interface to the alerts system and a few other fixes. Read on for details

Tags for alerts

It is now possible to configure to which (set of) computers alert rules are applied. The default is for the alerts to apply to all computers, but if you want, you can configure them individually.

As a consequence, the alerts page has been changed. Here is how it looks now:

More details can be viewed by clicking on each alert rule. For example, let’s take a look at the “Package upgrades” rule:

Here we can choose to subscribe to this alert, so we get a notification via email, view the affected computers or edit the rule.

Editing the rule brings us to this screen, where we can select to which computers (or groups of computers) it should apply:

Other changes

As usual, there have been a number of other smaller changes in Landscape:

• the client part now has a lower timeout for when dealing with packages that disappeared from a repository. Previously, the timeout was 24h, and now it’s just over an hour.
• when logging in on the server, we now show the timestamp of the previous login, and where it came from
• make the several client programs give back an error with a meaningful message instead of crashing when run as the incorrect user

Thanks again to all who sent feeedback!

This release brings in just a few small changes and bug fixes. Read on for details.

Changes and fixes

• Fixed a division by zero error in the Landscape client package
• New button “Select All” available when viewing an activity that needs approval
• Added some explanatory text about the usage of the Feedback option
• Fixed security upgrade alert
• Other smaller fixes

Thanks to all who sent feedback!

This week’s release consists mainly of fixes for both the client and the server. Read on for details.

Client Changes

• added to smart support for the “Breaks” dependency in “deb” packages
• landscape-config can now be run in a non-interactive mode to help deploy batch installations of the client. Please see the –help screen for details
• we are now starting to provide packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 (”intrepid”) version of the distribution
•  the script execution plugin now properly reports the script exit code to the server so that it can be used to mark a run as failed or succeeded

Server Changes

• fixed a problem with a “update-processes” message which was causing the server to erroneously block further messages from that client
• added a creation timestamp to invitations so administrators can tell for how long an invitation has been unclaimed
• fixed a concurrent access problem which would manifest itself mostly in the Monitoring page, where one or more graphs would randomly not be shown
• fixed a problem where activities viewed for selected computers could not be dismissed
• support-only users were being shown links to pages they had no access to

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!