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

["Kristian Erik Hermansen" <user=152@nabble.blu.org>]

 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 

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