Landscape Quickstart deployment

The so called quickstart mode of deploying Landscape consists of installing all the necessary software on a single machine. This is very handy for quickly checking out a new version of Landscape when you don’t have Juju, but should not be used for production deployments because it can’t be scaled.

Advantages:

• quick installation suitable for demo purposes or a small number of registered computers
• simple layout: everything on one machine

Disadvantages;

• single process per application
• no HA
• no horizontal scaling
• not recommended when using more than 500 clients

Installation

To install Landscape 23.03 using quickstart on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (“focal”) or 22.04 LTS (“jammy”), follow these simple steps:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:landscape/self-hosted-23.03
sudo apt-get install landscape-server-quickstart

As an optional step, if you have a valid Landscape license, copy it over to /etc/landscape/license.txt and restart the services. Otherwise, a free license with 10+50 seats (bare metal plus LXC containers) will be applied. Any machine with Ubuntu Pro can be managed by Landscape without requiring a Landscape license.

To add the license.txt file provided by your Canonical Sales Rep to your Landscape Server, upload or copy the file to the appropriate folder:

sudo cp license.txt /etc/landscape/license.txt
sudo lsctl restart

Setup first user

The first user that is created in Landscape automatically becomes the administrator of the “standalone” account. To create it, please go to https://<servername> and fill in the requested information.

Registering clients

In order to register a computer with Landscape, you need to install the landscape-client package:

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

The quickstart package generates and installs a self-signed SSL certificate in /etc/ssl/certs/landscape_server_ca.crt using the FQDN of the host for the commonName field of the certificate. A copy of this file will be needed on each computer that you register with Landscape.

On each computer, copy that certificate over to, say, /etc/landscape/server.pem and add this line to the configuration file /etc/landscape/client.conf:

ssl_public_key = /etc/landscape/server.pem

Then proceed with the registration request. Replace <server> with the FQDN of the quickstart host:

sudo landscape-config --account-name standalone --url https://<server>/message-system --ping-url http://<server>/ping

If you get registration errors on the client, the reason why it failed will most likely be in the /var/log/landscape/broker.log log file. If it’s SSL related, double check:

• ssl_public_key in /etc/landscape/client.conf should be pointing at a copy of the server self-signed certificate
• <server> in the URL of the landscape-config command-line must match the server hostname as used in the certificate. Check the outputs of hostname -f and hostname on the server
• check the commonName field of the certificate with openssl x509 -in <certificate-file> -noout -subject