Annoyedness at Windows Update has struck again, prompting me to rewrite my special caching program, designed specifically to cache the Windows Update downloads that Microsoft don't seem to like people retaining a copy of, preferring, for some reason, to use four times the necessary bandwidth to update someone's network of four machines. I do this through the combined power of a short Perl script, lynx, Apache, virtual machines, and overriding DNS.
Windows update pulls files from, for example, download.windowsupdate.com. So I put in my 'hosts' file, "10.1.1.123 download.windowsupdate.com". I then configure a virtualhost on Apache to handle requests for "download.microsoft.com", which puts those requests into the Perl script, which uses lynx to download (and save, if it's something worth caching) the file, and returns it, or, if it's downloaded it before, checks the headers of the original to make sure it has the whole thing, then returns it. Ta-da - I can now run Windows Update on any machine that needs it, and no update installer will be downloaded more than once. Irritation significantly reduced. The cache also doesn't interfere with normal browsing on any request it intercepts.
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