wpkgSync

WPKG is an automated software deployment, upgrade and removal program for Windows. It expects to connect to a SMB fileshare on a server on your local network. This obviously doesn't work for laptops which are out of the office.

We created wpkgSync to allow us to sync a copy of the remote wpkg structure to the local machine

we have created a repository on a public facing server with all our WPKG setup in it.
client computers will connect to this server using (only) a ssh key which we distribute with the installer
the server is of course locked down so this user can only read the files, but can write the logfile
in our environment we call this script after wpkg has run, it then uses (cw)rsync to update the local copy of the repository at c:\programdata\wpkg\
the next time wpkg runs, the cycle is repeated
in our environment we also schedule the script to run every 2 hours, and WPKG service to run every morning, to account for people not shutting down
we include a script (awk) which causes cwRsync to download only the packages folders we need

wpkgsync.bat file needs to run as Admin equivalent, so that rsync logging to logfile, and fixing up the permissions of the local package store will work, this is not a problem if we include it as a WPKG "post action".

usage:

to use this, on the end user computers make folders like:

c:\Program Files\WpkgSync

C:\PROGRAMDATA\WPKG
└───client

c:\ProgramData\wpkgsync\.ssh\
├───known_hosts
└───wpkgsyncuser.id

obtain the x86 or x64 version of cwRsync from https://www.itefix.net/cwRsync
copy the contents to "c:\Program Files\WpkgSync" or "c:\Program Files (x86)\WpkgSync" (x86 on x64) as appropriate
on the server create a user for this process to use.
grant the user read access on the wpkg folder
grant the user read/write access on the wpkgreports folder
create user id file using ssh-keygen, either the one on your server, or the one from the cwRsync package
put public part on server in the user .ssh folder, and private part at c:\ProgramData\wpkgsync.ssh\wpkgsyncuser.id
put public part on server in the file .ssh/authorized_keys
the first time you connect it will complain that the server is not a known host, answer Yes to conenct and the file c:\ProgramData\wpkgsync.ssh\known_hosts will be created.

build (optional):

to build with Inno Setup:

make a folder structure like:

{WPKGsyncBuildfolder}
├───client
├───config.company
│   └───.ssh
├───cwRsync_5.5.0_x86
└───cwRsync_6.2.4_x64

obtain the x86 AND x64 versions of cwRsync from https://www.itefix.net/cwRsync
copy the contents to {WPKGsyncBuildfolder}\cwRsync_version_arch\
obtain wpkg client from https://wpkg.org/Download, set up linux (?) server as above
copy the contents of {wpkg-folder}\client to {WPKGsyncBuildfolder}\client\
copy wpkg_local_settings.xml to {WPKGsyncBuildfolder}\client\
copy the other files in this repository to {WPKGsyncBuildfolder}\
run Inno Setup on the file: wpkgsync.iss
adjust the build number as required and compile (Ctrl+F9) the executable.
deploy the executable to run on the target computers somehow (using wpkg obviously)

returned codes:

  101: missing ini file
  102: could not read from ini file
  103: FIX_ACLS failed
  104: not running as Admin
other: setup rsync failed

call:

/fast - don't speed limit (default 2,000Kbps)
/setup  just do the minimum - top level

server structure:

the code assumes the following structure: