I’ve been trial running Ubuntu Landscape late 2007, but stopped using it because of some severe memory leakage problems. I gave feedback on this to Canonical, but didn’t get any update on this issue.
I’m actually not really impressed with what Landscape offers:
- Some extensive hardware info (like the System Hardware Information console) which serves little purpose
- Central user management which actually is just a front end to
adduserand related tools. I keep wondering why this solution was chosen, over things like LDAP. OK, they might want to improve on their Ldap client configuration first. - The package management is a nice feature to centrally check for updates, but not to the extent that one would consider paying for this extra service.
And that last remark goes for Landscap as a whole, actually. I would be curious to see which kind of rates apply for Landscape, but to be honest, the present features do not make it worth to me at any price. The features are just too little.
What we really need is something I’d call “Active Directory on steroids”. Something decentralized so we can easily manage different customer’s infrastructure. So we can centrally do user management, and delegate some organisational unit to a sub server, which eg. the customer can access. Put the Landscape backend in something Ldap. Integrate Samba into it. Make it open so other parties (eg. Zimbra.com) can plug in.
The problem with Ldap being just a standardized protocol, without anybody agreeing on the format of the data in it (one single addressbook schema any one?), we really need to agree on a base structure, without everyone building incompatible directory services. Oh and a decent front-end which enforces those choices would be good.
And yes, this is all plain possible with nowadays tools. But you have to extensively build this yourself. Some decent management tool which integrates those different technologies is really needed to get Linux on another level within businesses.
4 Comments
Well at work we decided to move everything in a windows AD (coming from openldap NT4 like linux domain controller) and let the linux servers autheticate against that one -to my surprise this worked pretty well. For central management I am now looking at puppet, but it will take a serious setup time.
Ghosty: (1) sur, AD is one solution, but we need a OSS solution next to it; (2) puppet: "it will take a serious time" is self explanatory.
Have a look at GOsa (https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/). I saw it on Fosdem and was impressed. I don’t have any idea how well it actually is.
Serge,
Thanks for trying Landscape out, I’m sorry it doesn’t meet your needs.
The key issue Landscape is trying to solve is making the management of a range of Ubuntu system efficient and easy. That means providing centralised information (like the hardware profile) to make debugging problems faster. You also want the ability to take common actions quickly (like package management) so you can manage more systems.
LDAP is pretty complex and setting it up in your network is a drawn out process as it effects so many pieces. Landscape gives you a way to have common usernames/passwords across systems – so it’s a light-weight first step! So Landscape fills a gap, but isn’t a replacement.
Steve