[racattack] Locally Cached ISOs

  • From: Seth Miller <sethmiller.sm@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: racattack@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:44:17 -0500

Ninjas,

I have great news.

After way too many hours, I have finally figured out how to have all of the
ISOs locally available without breaking any of Oracle's rules.

A few weeks ago I mentioned on this list that I thought we could cache the
downloads using Squid. This proved to be more difficult than I originally
thought because every download link has URL parameters "params" and
"AuthParam" that are either hashed, encrypted or both.

For example, here is an example of two download links for the same file in
the same session:

*
http://epd-akam-us.oracle.com/adcarurepos/vol/patch36/EPD/V33649-01.zip?FilePath=/adcarurepos/vol/patch36/EPD/V33649-01.zip&File=V33649-01.zip
*
&params=NGdZL1NLR0dSMU03Qndab2xHMU04QTphcnU9MTUyNjQ0NTUmZW1haWw9c21pbGxlcjA1QHNqbS5jb20mZmlsZV9pZD01MzAyODMxNSZwYXRjaF9maWxlPVYzMzY0OS0wMS56aXAmdXNlcmlkPWVwZC1zbWlsbGVyMDVAc2ptLmNvbSZzaXplPTYxMzY2MDQ5JmNvbnRleHQ9QUAxNStIQGFhcnV2bXRwMDgub3JhY2xlLmNvbStQQDE1Mzc1NjkxJmRvd25sb2FkX2lkPTg4MTg0MTE1&AuthParam=1378963234_9ebdd186f6cf5b9075cc7fad707654e2

*
http://epd-akam-us.oracle.com/adcarurepos/vol/patch36/EPD/V33649-01.zip?FilePath=/adcarurepos/vol/patch36/EPD/V33649-01.zip&File=V33649-01.zip
*
&params=SFdOcVBGRUhsdkZpTE9NRW5WMnlBdzphcnU9MTUyNjQ0NTUmZW1haWw9c21pbGxlcjA1QHNqbS5jb20mZmlsZV9pZD01MzAyODMxNSZwYXRjaF9maWxlPVYzMzY0OS0wMS56aXAmdXNlcmlkPWVwZC1zbWlsbGVyMDVAc2ptLmNvbSZzaXplPTYxMzY2MDQ5JmNvbnRleHQ9QUAxNStIQGFhcnV2bXRwMDYub3JhY2xlLmNvbStQQDE1Mzc1NjkxJmRvd25sb2FkX2lkPTg4MTk2MzYy&AuthParam=1378963241_327e153c4e9c83e8a5b6c65e2b385d2b

If you try to go to that address without that entire URL, you will get an
error message. So much for standard rewrite rules. But, I was able to find
a feature in Squid (version 2.7 only) that allows you to separate the cache
signature from everything else, including logging and authorization. In
other words, the full URL is passed for everything but only a unique static
portion of the URL is used for a caching signature.

Because of the fact that each user still needs to login and authenticate
against oracle.com and gets the unique URL for their download, we are
perfectly legal with Oracle while at the same time the user is able to
download locally cached ISOs. The only caveat is that the user must use the
server we have on site running Squid as their browser proxy for http and
https and must have enough of an internet connection to authenticate with
oracle.com.

As I'm sure many of you know how to configure the proxy settings in your
various browsers, I would appreciate if someone were to volunteer to put
together instructions on how to do that for the wiki. I am going to clean
up the code needed to make this work and package it up for OOW13.

Seth

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