Are there any plans to release to the public? There is a package for it in the repositories:
Placeholder for the Landscape client This package is currently empty, but will be updated to contain a client for the Landscape system. Landscape is a web-based tool for managing Ubuntu systems. On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 11:52 -0700, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote: > Although a very young product, Landscape will be a great tool for any > administrator managing a slew of Ubuntu machines. This is exactly the > tool I wish I had when I was running a small Linux lab for IBM while a > student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst a few years ago. > Rather than this great tool, I was forced to write custom scripts to > manage all the machines. Well, I did have fun with it. One time, I > was able to make the 30+ machines perform a symphony using the beep > command :-) One LUG member and I even went so far as to create a > mapping in Python to allow basic music composition, and to assign > which hosts would play what part. It was really cool, and just like > being a conductor. It was even cooler when we piped logs through > festival to warn users when something bad was happening. Anyways, > that was just one of the things that kept us busy. If we have > Landscape, we could have actually been doing our homework instead! > > So, what's nice about Landscape is that it allows and admin access to > all the machines in the group. You can queue up tasks, and they will > run on the hosts you assign. You have the power. You can even kill > processes remotely. For instance, just to test it out, I ran > gnome-calculator, then went to the web interface, and queued it to end > the process. A few moments later, and my client received the request > and the process died. Very cool. > > Additionally, the client sends out info about the hardware. So, if > you need to keep track of inventory, this would be a very useful > feature. I mean, who wants to go around and physically gather serial > numbers anyways, right?!?! > > And just to mention the infrastructure, we all know that Mark > Shuttleworth is addicted to Python. So, it is true that Landscape is > also built this way, just as Launchpad presumably has tons of Python > code within. The web service runs on top of the Python Twisted > framework, which is a wonderful platform to build on and allow rapid > development. I myself have fallen in love with Python and Twisted > allows developers to create applications with a amazing number of > features in very little time. I used Twisted when I worked at Cisco > to build some cool networking tools. These days, hellanzb is a past > time of mine, and hellanzb is built on top of Twisted as well. Many > good things from such a simple tool. Go Python!!! > > So, this is my very naive review of Landscape. It is still in the > early stages (beta), but I think it is safe to say that we can expect > great things in the future from this offering by Canonical. Saving > administrators time and energy will mean they are happier and more > productive. Maybe I wouldn't have gotten in so much trouble during my > college years had I utilized Landscape :-) > -- > Kristian Erik Hermansen > -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
