Ubuntu Server Management with Landscape

Both at work and personally, I run a lot of Ubuntu servers. It’s now the standard OS choice for any new servers too. To help with management of these servers, I’ve settled on a combination of New Relic’s server monitoring (and app monitoring for a certain few apps) and the self-hosted/dedicated version of Canonical’s Landscape Dedicated Server.

It’s pretty simple to get set up. You’ll need a server running Ubuntu to install it on. I chose a Digital Ocean $20 droplet.

Create your droplet, run all current updates and check that that hostname is a FQDN. Next, login to the box and switch to root.

add-apt-repository ppa:landscape/15.01
apt-get update
apt-get install landscape-server-quickstart

After this has finished, you will now have an SSL cert at /etc/ssl/certs/landscape_server_ca.crt which you need to copy and make a note of.

root@landscape-server:~# cat /etc/ssl/certs/landscape_server_ca.crt
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIICAzCCAWygAwIBAgIJANbXg3JbmTu9MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMCYxJDAiBgNV
...
[snipped]
...
3fJBHsY6i5i70Gq/5FUV7O7bP7/wnLKIljrO7gI/d5DNEQmXUkgY
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Make a safe note of the contents of that file. Next, switch over to your client server, and run the following as root:

root@landscape-client:~# mkdir /etc/landscape
root@landscape-client:~# apt-get install landscape-client

This will install the landscape client. Next, create the file /etc/landscape/server.pem and then paste the contents of the server SSL cert into this file.

After this, you need to add the variable ssl_public_key to your Landscape configuration file:

echo ssl_public_key = /etc/landscape/server.pem >> /etc/landscape/client.conf

The final step is to run the configuration utility on the client machine:

root@landscape-client:~# landscape-config --computer-title `hostname` --account-name standalone  --url https://landscape-server/message-system --ping-url http://landscape-server/ping

You’ll be asked a few questions about getting setup and what to allow, tags to use etc. Customise to suit and then register the machine when prompted. If you get a connection error then check you’ve pasted the certificate correctly and added the ssl_public_key variable correctly too.

A couple of links that were useful reference:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/549809/how-do-i-install-landscape-for-personal-use

https://help.landscape.canonical.com/LDS/QuickstartDeployment14.10