Getting started with Landscape

See also: What is Landscape?

This tutorial guides you through the process of installing Landscape Server on a Multipass virtual machine, configuring it, registering a client instance to Landscape, and running a script on your client instance.

This tutorial should take about 45 minutes to complete.

Prerequisites

There’s a few things you’ll need before starting this tutorial.

Hardware

You’ll need a workstation with enough disk space (25G) and memory (5G RAM) available to create two Multipass VMs: one with 20G disk space and 4G RAM for Landscape Server and one with 5G disk space and 1G RAM for Landscape Client. Your workstation will be called your “host machine” throughout this tutorial.

Multipass

For this tutorial, Multipass needs to be installed on your host machine. To install Multipass, run the following in your terminal:

sudo snap install multipass

If you want to learn more about Multipass, see their installation guide and full documentation.

Ubuntu Pro token

You’ll need an Ubuntu Pro token. Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 machines, and you can use the free version for this tutorial.

If you already have an Ubuntu Pro account, you can copy your token from your Ubuntu Pro dashboard.

If you don’t have an Ubuntu Pro account, first sign up for a free personal Ubuntu Pro account, then copy your token from your Ubuntu Pro dashboard.

Create the virtual machines

Now, let’s create the Multipass virtual machines (VMs). From the command line, run:

multipass launch noble --cpus 2 --memory 4G --disk 20G --name tutorial-landscape-server-noble
multipass launch jammy --cpus 1 --memory 1G --disk 5G --name tutorial-landscape-client-jammy

This step will take a few minutes to complete, but you’ll receive progress updates in the command line. These commands create two VMs total: one for your Landscape Server and one for Landscape Client. Your Landscape Server will run on Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat (the VM named tutorial-landscape-server-noble) and Landscape Client will run on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish (the VM named tutorial-landscape-client-jammy).

You’ll need the IP address of the tutorial-landscape-server-noble VM later, so let’s get it now. Run the following on your host machine:

multipass info tutorial-landscape-server-noble

Copy the IP address from the output, saving it somewhere you can access later.

The full output should be similar to the details below.

Name:           tutorial-landscape-server-noble
State:          Running
Snapshots:      0
IPv4:           10.253.187.38
Release:        Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
Image hash:     28d2f9df3ac0 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
CPU(s):         2
Load:           0.05 0.10 0.04
Disk usage:     1.8GiB out of 19.3GiB
Memory usage:   410.0MiB out of 3.8GiB
Mounts:         --

In this example output, the IP address for the tutorial-landscape-server-noble VM is 10.253.187.38. We’ll use that IP address throughout this tutorial, but the commands you run later should use the IP address that you just copied and saved.

Install Landscape Server

Now, we’re ready to install Landscape Server! We’ll install Landscape Server on the tutorial-landscape-server-noble VM. To do this, open a shell on that VM:

multipass shell tutorial-landscape-server-noble

After running that command, the prompt should change to ubuntu@tutorial-landscape-server-noble. This means you’re now in your tutorial-landscape-server-noble VM, and any commands will be run on that VM instead of your host machine.

Now install some required packages by running the command below:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ca-certificates software-properties-common

Then add the landscape/latest-stable PPA to get access to the Landscape Server packages by running this command:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:landscape/latest-stable

Your VM’s package information will now be up-to-date and includes information about the Landscape packages. Run the command below to install Landscape Server on your VM:

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y landscape-server-quickstart

The installation will take some time during which you’ll get a lot of output. You can ignore the output for this tutorial. For the full details on installing Landscape in quickstart mode, see our how to install Landscape quickstart guide.

Once installation is complete, you can exit the shell by executing the exit command:

exit

You command prompt should go back to your standard host machine prompt after you exit the VM.

Register the first Landscape administrator

From a browser on your host machine, navigate to https://10.253.187.38 replacing the IP address in the URL with the one for your Landscape Server VM. Your browser will likely warn about a self-signed certificate. It’s OK to accept the risk and continue in this case. Complete the form to create the first admin user for the standalone account. Once you complete the form, Landscape will automatically bootstrap your new account. Now you are logged in to Landscape and can start registering and managing client computers.

Install and configure Landscape Client

From your host machine, open a shell to the jammy client VM.

multipass shell tutorial-landscape-client-jammy

Your prompt should now be ubuntu@tutorial-landscape-client-jammy.

Attach your pro token, replacing your-pro-token with your actual Pro token.

sudo pro attach your-pro-token

When completed, the output should include lines similar to the ones below (along with other lines that we are not displaying here):

This machine is now attached to 'Ubuntu Pro - free personal subscription'

     Account: your_name@example.com
Subscription: Ubuntu Pro - free personal subscription

Next, get the server’s public SSL certificate and save it where landscape-client can use it when it needs to make HTTPS requests to your Landscape Server. Replace the IP address with the one for your Landscape Server VM, but keep the :443 port.

echo | openssl s_client -connect 10.253.187.38:443 | openssl x509 | sudo tee /etc/landscape/server.pem

Now you’ll install Landscape Client.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y landscape-client

Edit the /etc/landscape/client.conf file to match the contents below. Be sure to replace the IP address in both url and ping_url with the one for your Landscape Server VM.

[client]
log_level = info
url = https://10.253.187.38/message-system
ping_url = http://10.253.187.38/ping
data_path = /var/lib/landscape/client
ssl_public_key = /etc/landscape/server.pem
account_name = standalone
computer_title = tutorial-landscape-client-jammy
include_manager_plugins = ScriptExecution
script_users = landscape,ubuntu

If you’re not sure how to edit the file, you can use nano to do so.

sudo nano /etc/landscape/client.conf

Change the file as needed and press CTRL-O followed by ENTER to save the file and CTRL-X to exit.

Next, send a registration request to Landscape Server.

sudo landscape-config --silent

You should see a message indicating that the registration message was successfully sent to Landscape Server. If you get a message indicating that client was unable to connect to the server, double-check that you downloaded the server’s certificate to the /etc/landscape/ directory and that the IP address in the /etc/landscape/client.conf file is correct.

You can now exit your Jammy VM and return to your host machine.

exit

Go to your Landscape Server UI in your browser and click the arrow icon in the header. You should have a notification that a pending computer needs attention. Click that notification, select your computer, and click Accept.

Run a script

From the Organisation home page in the Landscape web portal, click on the Scripts tab. Click Add script to create a script with the following contents to be run as the ubuntu user. Give it the name Hello World and save it.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello, World!" > /home/ubuntu/hello

From the Computers page, select your computer and then click the Scripts tab. Select the Hello World script and click Next. You can leave all the other defaults, then click Run to create an activity to run the script on your Jammy VM.

Once the activity succeeds, the status of your activity in the web portal will change to “1 activity finished successfully”. You can check the file was created by opening a shell on your Jammy VM.

multipass shell tutorial-landscape-client-jammy

The directory listing should show the file hello in the ubuntu user’s home directory.

ls -l

And the contents should be Hello, World!.

cat hello

After you’ve confirmed the file exists on your VM, you can return to your host machine:

exit

Cleanup

Congratulations! You now have successfully installed Landscape Server on a Multipass VM, registered another Multipass VM running Landscape Client, and executed a script on that VM. Feel free to explore the other management features that Landscape Server has to offer.

When you’re done, don’t forget to remove the Multipass VMs from your host machine:

multipass delete tutorial-landscape-server-noble
multipass delete tutorial-landscape-client-jammy
multipass purge

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