Canonical Landscape alternative

[s1037989]

Hi! Many of you have probably heard of Ubuntu and Canonical's Landscape. Landscape is a simple service for managing a collection of Ubuntu systems. An agent is installed on each Ubuntu system and sends status information back to the central "mothership". From the web-based controller, you can even send commands back to the agent.

There's some problems with this... Landscape server is not open source and Landscape, as far as I can tell, does not work on non-Ubuntu systems. It's also fairly limiting in the information and alerting, IMO. Landscape client, BTW, is written in Python.

I'd like to start a new project that starts from scratch and open sources both sides. I have a pretty good plan so far but need help on some ideas and certainly some coding. I can turn my start into a github project so we can work from there.

Is this the best place to solicit support or should I post elsewhere? If this is a good place, any interest?

[Old_Gray_Bear]

Sounds like someone in Cannonical decided to re-invent Nagios.

Nagios allows probes ('plugins' in Nagios) sitting on the leaf-systems to report back to an aggregation server (your Mother Ship). You can configure probes to do anything; literally anything -- report status, execute commands; impose resource limits, anything your heart desires (and you can code). There is a robust User Community around Nagios and a lot of pre-built plugins available.

[NetWallah]

See OCS Inventory - although it is mostly PHP based, it does have some perl.

[chrestomanci]

Looks like the other thing that Canonical decided to re-invent is puppet (or Chief)

From the look of the remarkably content free description, it looks like Landscape is a low featured closed source monitoring and remote control tool for Ubuntu servers with a pretty GUI

Puppet and Nagios are both open source and fully featured, the problem (in my experience) is that they can be tricky to configure without a fair investment of effort, making them not worth it if you only want to manage and monitor a small number of computers.

With that in mind, perhaps the best way of improving things would be to develop a simplified wrapper around Puppet and Nagios, that replaces many of the complex stuff with simplified defaults, so that an admin can get a basic setup working quickly and easily.

[Anonymous Monk]

I wonder if some parts of Webmin could help in your project, or maybe your project could become a Webmin module.