Raspbian OS Repo Purge, Citrix

Overview

1. We (me and 2 other teammates) finished the funcitons of synchronizing packages from the Raspbian.org with the total 77GB packages on the Repo Server (Azure Cloud Server), and we coded the autoscript to update the packages on time.
2. We tested the customize company packages workspacehub-cef (workspace hub Chromium Embedded Framework) on the client device (Raspberry Pi) by apt install command.
3. We made a Cache Server by AptCacherNg on the Alibaba Cloud server, the statistics would appear on the browser side.

Technical Parts

Citrix Repo Server

This repo server was built based only for Debian buster distribution, and we have to add Citrix component in the pool directory to make the apt command recognizable. Here are two critical challenges:

• How to colone only buster distribution?

We finished this part by the command rsync command, the benefit is at that it does not clone the file which the modified time equals to source file, which means it would never download for the same file twice. We made the server work for both dist and pool, this also ensures the Update funciton for the later usage.

• How to make the apt install command work for the client machine?

Before we really achieved the installment function for the company pacakge, we first had to configure the repo server, we created a citrix distribution directory in the dist, and there are two files we have to notice Release and InRealease, the only difference between these two files is that Release needs Release.gpg file to be equivalent with InRealease for the usage of signature, the point of keeping these two kind of files is to avoid the race condition. The way we generate the Release and InRealease files are by gpg command. Besides, we also need the workspacehub-cef debian packages in the pool to be indexabled for the dist/citrix/binary-armfh (workspacehub-cef is a binary file), here another necessacity is to generate Packages file to index the pool/citrix/workspacehub-cef, we made it by apt-ftparchive packages command. The final step is on the client machine,

Make it runnable on the user machine

Since we have the preparation above, the next step is just to make some modification on the user machine to connect with the repo server. We made it by modifying the source.list to add the ip address, distribution, and components. Finally, we could make it work on the client machine, the client machine was able to install the workspacehub-cef package successfully.

Make the Cache Server to Reduce the Traffic

The last part of project is to design a cache server to redirect the traffic from the client machine. I personally was responsible for this critical part, I made it possible by deploying another cache server (Alibaba Cloud Server). The basic work here is to configure the cache machine, this contain configure the fields like CacheDir, LogDir, Port, Remap and etc. Eventually we have to create a configuration file named apt-cacher-ng on the client machine to add the acquired ip address of the cache server, and the command trafic will automatically be transferred to the cache server before reaching the repo server! For the client machine, the statistics could be viewed on the browser by the binded port.

Please check the demo video to see how it works!

License

Copyright 2019-present Dengpan Yuan.