We’re releasing a new version of Landscape on February 26th. While we roll-out the code to Landscape’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.
Goes offline: 18:00 February 26th 2009 UTC
Expected back online: 19:00 February 26th 2009 UTC
Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new!
We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.
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:
We believe this alert will be useful for many administrators out there.
Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback, and see you next time!
We’re releasing a new version of Landscape on February 25th. While we roll-out the code to Landscape’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.
Goes offline: 18:00 February 25th 2009 UTC
Expected back online: 19:00 February 25th 2009 UTC
Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new!
We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.
We’re releasing a new version of Landscape on February 11th. While we roll-out the code to Landscape’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.
Goes offline: 18:00 February 11th 2009 UTC
Expected back online: 19:00 February 11th 2009 UTC
Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new!
We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.
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.
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 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.
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.
This release of Landscape brings in some enhancements to alerts and scripts attachments, as well as a few other fixes. Read on for details.
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.
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.
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.
We’re releasing a new version of Landscape on January 21st. While we roll-out the code to Landscape’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.
Goes offline: 18:00 January 21st 2009 UTC
Expected back online: 19:00 January 21st 2009 UTC
Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new!
We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.
We’re releasing a new version of Landscape on December 17th. While we roll-out the code to Landscape’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.
Goes offline: 18.00 December 17th 2008 UTC
Expected back online: 19.00 December 17th 2008 UTC
Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new!
We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.
We’re releasing a new version of Landscape on November 26th. While we roll-out the code to Landscape’s servers, we’ll have to take the service offline.
Goes offline: 18.00 November 26th 2008 UTC
Expected back online: 19.00 November 26th 2008 UTC
Keep an eye on this blog after the release to find out what’s new!
We’re sorry for the downtime you’ll experience during the roll-out.
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.
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:
Thanks to all that sent feedback to the Landscape team, it is really appreciated!
These are the specific changes in this release compared to the previous one: