Questions[repository](server)

I have a collection of CentOS servers in my corporate network. For security reasons, most servers do not have general outbound internet access unless it is a core functional requirement for the server.

This creates a challenge when I need to update packages. For yum repositories, I currently mirror all needed repos from the internet, and make the mirrors available inside the intranet. I keep copies of each repo in each of our five environments: dev, QA, staging, and two production datacenters.

I don't currently solve for language-specific package repos. When servers need an update from rubygems, PyPI, PECL, CPAN or npm, they have to acquire temporary outbound internet access to fetch the packages. I've been asked to start mirroring rubygems and PyPI, and the rest will probably follow.

All of this is clunky and doesn't work well. I'd like to replace it with a single caching proxy in one environment and four daisy-chained proxies in my other environments, to eliminate the complexity and disk overhead of full mirrors. Additionally:

• It can be either a forward or reverse proxy; each package manager supports a proxy server or a custom repository endpoint, which could be either a local mirror or a reverse proxy.
• It needs granular access control, so I can limit which client IPs can connect to which repo domains.
• Clients need to be able to follow redirects to unknown domains. Your original request might be limited to rubygems.org, but if that server returns a 302 to a random CDN, you should be able to follow it.
• It should support HTTPS backends. I don't necessarily need to impersonate other SSL servers, but I should be able to re-expose an HTTPS site over HTTP, or terminate and re-encrypt with a different certificate.

I was initially looking at reverse proxies, and Varnish seems to be the only one that would allow me to internally resolve 302 redirects within the proxy. However, the free version of Varnish does not support HTTPS backends. I'm now evaluating Squid as a forward proxy option.

This seems like something that ought to be a relatively common problem within enterprise networks, but I'm having trouble finding examples of how other people have solved this. Has anyone implemented something similar or have thoughts on how best to do so?

Thanks!

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 across my entire environment. To make code deploys easier, we are implementing a private apt repository where we can deploy builds of our code.

One of the requirements of this repository will be that our QA department will be able to install any version of our application at any time.

Can I store multiple versions of the same package in an apt-repository (preferably in the same distribution)? If not, what are some possible workarounds that I could use to get the behavior described above?

is there a command to see what packages are available from a certain ppa repository?

How can i disable totally the prompts that appear while installing a Debian package, i've used all the options that i've found but there are some packages that are still prompting.

I'm using this command:

apt-get -y --allow-unauthenticated --force-yes -o DPkg::Options::="--force-overwrite" -o DPkg::Options::="--force-confdef" install x11-common

Why the x11-common package is still prompting? how can i get rid of these prompts?

Thanks in advance

--Victor

Edit: just to clarify, the prompts are not "yes/no" prompts, are open questions in a coloured screen (typical two color screen) but i want to set the default option of these questions

I have a windows server which I can access locally or remotely over the internet through remote desktop connection, etc.

I want to set up a git repository (something similar to "trunk" in subversion), that can contain a series of repositories for multiple projects.

Does anyone know how I go about doing this? I want to do it using a GUI if possible. I have followed this Git Bash Tutorial but it's very long winded and not exactly what I'm after.

I'm using a Git client called MSYSGIT. Using this I just want to be able to set up remote repositories and start committing source code.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!