REVIEW: Quick Assessment of Canonical's Landscape Management tool for Ubuntu Infrastructures

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

On 10/11/07, Alexandro Silva <penguim at gmail.com> wrote:
> After execute aptitude update, the system display the following error:
>
> W: GPG error: http://landscape.canonical.com ./ Release: The following
> signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available:
> NO_PUBKEY 258CC5DAC605E80D
> W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
>
> What GPG key?

<snip>
Dear Kristian,

As you may know, on 22nd July 2007, Canonical announced the
availability of Landscape [1], its web-based systems management tool
for Ubuntu servers and desktops. Landscape is specifically designed to
help in management and support of desktop, laptop and server
deployments.

As a Canonical support services customer, Landscape is now part of
your support services agreement and available to you at no additional
charge.

You have been set-up on the Landscape service and are just a few short
steps from being able to easily administer your Ubuntu system. If you
have problems setting up the service or run into problems please call
the support team who'll be happy to help.

Separately to your Landscape account you'll receive an email telling
you about the Canonical support portal where you can enter issues for
the support team through a Web interface.

To get up and running with Landscape you need to do the following:

1. Administrator Account
You will receive an email inviting you to Landscape. Please follow the
instructions in order to create your Administrator login.

2.  Organisation Account
Each Account within Landscape represents a group of machines which are
managed by a set number of administrators.  The Account login is
needed when a machine is attached to the Account.  Your Account
details have been set-up by the support team and are as follows:
        Account: <BLANKED>
        Entitlement: A maximum of 1 machine can be registered

3. Administrators join an Account
Each Account can have up to two Administrators set-up for them who
have the ability to manage the machines.

Your nominated contacts will receive an email telling them they've
been invited to your Account.  They join the Account by following the
link in the email.

Once they've done this they can login to the Landscape service and see
your organisation's Account.

4. Set-up the Landscape client
The Landscape client software enables machines to communicate with the
central server, sending information to the web service and performing
actions requested by registered administrators.

The Landscape client package is signed by the Landscape teams GPG key.
To install the package, first import the GPG key for the Landscape
team from the Ubuntu public keyserver, using the following command in
a terminal:

  $ gpg --keyserver-options http-proxy \
        --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com  \
        --recv-key C605E80D

To make this key available for Synaptic, run the following command:

  $ gpg --armor --export C605E80D | sudo apt-key add -

The landscape client is available as an Ubuntu package for Ubuntu 6.06
Dapper, Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy and Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty from the landscape
website.  To enable the landscape package repository please add a file
named landscape.list to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ .  The file should
contain one of the following lines, depending on the Ubuntu version of
the computer being enabled.

For Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper:
  deb http://landscape.canonical.com/packages/dapper ./

For Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy:
  deb http://landscape.canonical.com/packages/edgy ./

For Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty:
  deb http://landscape.canonical.com/packages/feisty ./

The Landscape client may then be installed from synaptic or the command line:

  $ sudo apt-get update
  $ sudo apt-get install landscape-client

During installation of the Landscape client it will request details
about the computer and the account.  More specifically:

  1) Computer Title - a short descriptive title for the computer.
     Use the hostname if unsure.

  2) Account Name - the account name provided above. The account
     name is seen in the URL, and may also be found when editing
     the account information.
  3) Registration Password - the password provided above

After installation the system will register with the central Landscape
server.  This registration process may take several minutes.


5. Complete machine registrations
Once registration is complete you can login to the Landscape service
at https://landscape.canonical.com/.  The machine being registered
will be shown in the list of 'Pending Computers'.  An administrator
with access to the account may then accept the pending computer to be
able to manage this machine with Landscape.

If you have any problems or questions please contact the Canonical
Support Team on +1 514 940 8895.

We would really welcome your feedback about Landscape. There is a
feedback button on the left hand side of the webpage - please use it
lots!


Regards,

The Support Team

[1] Landscape availability announcement:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/landscape-system-management-tool
</snip>
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen