Terms

Landscape Documentation
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Contents:

Access groups

In Landscape, access groups are logical groupings used by administrators to assign specific administrative rights to computers on a per-group basis. Each computer can only be in one access group. In addition to computers, access groups can contain package profiles, scripts and custom graphs.

A new Landscape installation comes with a single access group, called global, which gives any administrators who are associated with roles that include that access group control over every computer managed by Landscape. Most organisations will want to subdivide administration responsibilities by creating logical groupings of computers.

Typical access groups might be constructed around organizational units or departments, locations or hardware architecture. You can manage access groups from the Access groups tab in your organisation’s home page. See how to create access groups, add computers to access groups, and associate roles with access groups.

It’s good practice to create and document a naming convention for access groups before you deploy Landscape, so that all administrators understand what constitutes an acceptable logical grouping for your organization.

Administrators

Administrators are people who are authorized to manage computers using Landscape. You can manage administrators from the Administrators tab in your organisation’s home page.

In the Administrators tab, the upper part of the screen displays a list of existing administrators and their email addresses. If you’re running self-hosted Landscape, the first user you create automatically becomes an administrator of your account. If you’re using Landscape SaaS, Canonical sends you an administrator invitation when your account is created. After that, you must create additional administrators yourself. You’re encouraged to carefully consider who you make an administrator, because administrators have elevated permissions and can make changes that affect users and the entire system.

Alerts

Landscape uses alerts to notify administrators of conditions that require attention. You can manage alerts from the Alerts tab in your organisation’s home page.

Architecture

Architecture is the specific CPU or hardware the software has been built for. Examples include amd64, i386, armhf, arm64, s390x and source (for source packages).

Components

Components are categories of software in Ubuntu’s repository. They include main, restricted, universe and multiverse.

Distribution

A distribution is a flavor of Linux. Ubuntu is an example of a Linux distribution.

Package

A package is a group of related files for an application that makes it easy to install, upgrade and remove the application. Each package is managed via a package profile, which is a record of the package’s dependencies and conflicts. You can manage packages from the Packages tab in the Computers page.

Pocket

A pocket is where packages are stored. Some examples from Landscape include release, updates, security, proposed or backports.

Profiles

Package profile

A package profile, or meta-package, comprises a set of one or more packages, including their dependencies and conflicts (generally called constraints), that you can manage as a group. Package profiles specify sets of packages that associated systems should always get, or never get. You can associate zero or more computers with each package profile via tags to install packages on those computers. You can also associate a package profile with an access group, which limits its use to only computers within the specified access group. You can manage package profiles from the Profiles tab in your organisation’s home page.

Removal profile

A removal profile defines a maximum number of days that a computer can go without exchanging data with the Landscape server before it is automatically removed. If more days pass than the profile’s “Days without exchange”, that computer will automatically be removed and the license seat it held will be released. This helps Landscape keep license seats open and ensure Landscape is not tracking stale or retired computer data for long periods of time. You can associate zero or more computers with each removal profile via tags to ensure those computers are governed by this removal profile. You can also associate a removal profile with an access group, which limits its use to only computers within the specified access group. You can manage removal profiles from the Profiles tab in your organisation’s home page.

Upgrade profile

An upgrade profile defines a schedule for the times when upgrades are to be automatically installed on the machines associated with a specific access group. You can associate zero or more computers with each upgrade profile via tags to install packages on those computers. You can also associate an upgrade profile with an access group, which limits its use to only computers within the specified access group. You can manage upgrade profiles from the Profiles tab in your organisation’s home page.

Repositories

Repositories store the necessary files and resources for a project. Linux distributions like Ubuntu use repositories to hold packages you can install on managed computers. While Ubuntu has several repositories that anyone can access, you can also maintain your own repositories on your network. This can be useful when you want to maintain packages with different versions from those in the community repositories, or if you’ve packaged in-house software for installation.

Roles

Roles are predefined user groups or access levels that determine the actions and permissions users can have. For each access group, you can assign management privileges to administrators with roles. An administrator may manage an access group only if they are associated with a role that has permission to do so. Administrators may be associated with multiple roles, and roles may be associated with many access groups. You can manage roles from the Roles tab in your organisation’s home page.

Scripts

Scripts can be used to automate tasks, perform actions and make changes to multiple computers at once. Landscape lets you run scripts on the computers you manage in your account. The scripts may be in any language, as long as an interpreter for that language is present on the computers on which they are to run. You can maintain a library of scripts for common tasks. You can manage scripts from the Scripts tab in your organisation’s home page, and run them against computers from the Scripts menu in the Computers page.

Series

A series is a distribution release nickname. Examples of Ubuntu series include Jammy, Focal and Bionic.

Suite

A suite is a combination of a series and a pocket. An example that can be used in Landscape is bionic-updates.

Tags

Tags are user-defined labels or metadata that can be used to organise your computers in Landscape. Landscape lets you group multiple computers by applying tags to them. You can group computers using any set of characteristics; architecture and location might be two logical tagging schemes. Tag names may use any combination of letters, numbers, and dashes. Each computer can be associated with multiple tags. There is no menu choice for tags; rather, you can select multiple computers from the Computers page in the header and apply or remove one or more tags to all the computers you select in the Info tab. If you want to specify more than one tag at a time for your selected computers, separate the tags by spaces.