From the Canyon Edge -- :-Dustin

Monday, November 15, 2010

Landscape for the Ubuntu Evangelist-turned-Remote-Sysadmin


Like many of you here at Planet Ubuntu, I'm on a continuous quest to convert friends and family to Ubuntu. I'm proud to say that Ubuntu users now includes my parents, my wife, her parents, both of my sisters, her sister, their husbands, and several friends.

On the overwhelming whole, they're all quite satisfied with Ubuntu. They like that it's virus-free, never crashes, does not pathologically slow down over time, and that it generally just works.

That said, whenever I visit any of the above parties, I generally spend a good 30 minutes to an hour giving their Ubuntu system a good tune-up. Usually that just entails installing all updates, etc. But sometimes there's a bit more work to be done. This is time I would rather spend with my family, and them with me.

I previously have not had a use case for Canonical's Landscape service. I don't use it for my systems at home, as I have a static IP and an SSH connection to my suite of servers, desktops, and virtual machines, with which I can generally do all that I need.

But that's not the case for my relatives. I recently realized how much Landscape would help me remotely manage my extended family's Ubuntu systems.

I am, for all practical purposes, their system administrator, and Landscape gives me a really convenient way of managing each of their systems remotely, wherever they are, from wherever I am -- which is typically not one in the same.

So just an idea from left field, here... Landscape is generally targeted at enterprise users trying to manage data centers full of Ubuntu Servers. But I'm finding it really convenient to manage a few dozen machines scattered about the country while I travel around the globe. Nice job, Landscape team.
Note that unlike Ubuntu, Landscape is an optional, value-add, paid-for service on top of Ubuntu.
:-Dustin

15 comments:

  1. I agree, unfortunately it's not remotely prices for home users who still need someone to manage their computer. Maybe if the landscape team were to do 1st 5 Desktops free or something it would catch on more.

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  2. Dustin,
    Are you paying full price for landscape subscriptions for those home computers or are you taking advantage of a Canonical employee discount?

    -jef

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  3. Jef,

    I am, in fact, using the Canonical employee discount.

    :-Dustin

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  4. Thanks for the kind words Dustin. There's a nice trick you can do if you need SSH access to a machine (and you have a server to create a reverse SSH tunnel back to):

    https://help.landscape.canonical.com/RunningScripts/ExampleScripts

    It might come in handy one day. On the topic of the price, we've discussed this before. As you say, our target is enterprise users for whom the price isn't a problem, but it is high for home users. What's not clear is how big a market there is for home users... it's hard to tell if creating a product for that use case would actually be worth the investment (considering things like implementation time, maintenance and support costs).

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  5. Hi Jamu,

    Right, as Jef noted, I'm not paying for this service.

    I think I would pay for it, though, but probably not enterprise prices for the use case described above. I'd guess I'd pay $100-$200 per year to manage maybe 10-20 systems this way.

    :-Dustin

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  6. It would be good for Canonical to allow have a family license, that would allow exactly what your talking about.

    I know I would use it for looking after my families computers, if the price was right.

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  7. Dustin,

    It always comes down to the question of value for money for both the producer and the consumer for any service. It's unfortunate that only Canonical employees can get the gratis accounts to play with in this way. You might get some excellent feedback on your idea by making Landscape available to some prominent external Ubuntu members to use with their families.

    Key questions that must have to be answers.

    Can Landscape be offered at the price point you'd be willing to pay without incurring a financial lost in terms of service operation?

    If so, would such a Landscape offering have reduced services compared to the standard enterprise product?

    If so, would you have to take steps to contractually prevent enterprise admins from taking advantage of the home-admin price point?

    If so, which features of the current Landscape service would be dropped in the home administrator price point and reserved for the enterprise solution?

    -jef

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  8. If I uderstood it correctly, the public price for 'basic desktop' is 66$/year/machine... I think this is way too much...

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  9. I wasn't happy with the service for our services where I work.

    Gurkan

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  10. Dustin

    I'm like you - every time I visit family I get the computer questions. And 9\10 I end up wiping their WindoZe systems and installing Ubuntu.

    I'd love to be able to remotely manage them, but as others have said, for 4 or 5 machines a few times every few months, it would be cool to have a "Family Package" where a user could pay a few dollars\pounds a month on say "5 or less", "10 or less" machines.

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  11. Thanks Ted, et al.

    Jamu, the manager of the Landscape team and product, is subscribed here, so I think he's hearing your suggestions.

    If Canonical could make it economically viable, I'd love to see a "Landscape Family Plan" available.

    :-Dustin

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  12. Dustin,

    I agree, a non-Enterprise Landscape service would be synergistic with Ubuntu's word of mouth growth vector and with the Ubuntu One service concept.

    And not just with families. There's big uptake of Ubuntu in places like education labs and what not because of word of mouth...places where enterprise pricing isn't affordable...but where a Landscape like service could be valuable. What's the price point that's viable in those sorts of not-for-profit deployment situations?

    You yourself have seen and commented on this blog about Ubuntu widely deployed in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange..which sits smack in the middle of the enterpise target audience for current Landscape offerings. Are they Landscape customers? If not... why not?

    The demographics of Landscape service uptake is completely opaque, as Canonical doesn't talk about Landscape at all really...so I can't really give concrete suggestions without knowing more about how Landscape is fairing as a service.

    But I will say that a Landscape-like managed service does make sense in a friends and family support setting...especially if you can bundle it with a freinds and family Ubuntu One value offering. That could snowball via word of mouth. But can you do it at the price point people will pay? I just don't know.

    -jef

    -jef

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  13. Hi Jef, et al-

    I proposed something along these lines internally and some people at Canonical are going to look into the feasibility providing some of Landscape or Landscape-like services through Ubuntu One. Stay tuned...

    :-Dustin

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  14. (Oh, note that it was pointed out to me that I'm hardly the first to suggest something like this internally. The idea has been kicked around before. Maybe this time it'll stick!)

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  15. Any news or developments on this?

    I am a computer programmer and recently started volunteering at weekends to teach basic programming at a correctional facility here in Iceland.

    I'm using ubuntu and have 10 installations and ideally i'd like to be able to manage them all from one place so landscape makes sense.

    But at the current price bracket its going to be hard to justify for me as a volunteer...

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Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

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