Daniel Nashed's Blog

Engage session follow-up – Domino 14.5 AutoUpdate downloads

Thanks to everyone who attended my 8:00 AM session on Wednesday. One topic raised during the session deserves a closer look: how Domino AutoUpdate retrieves installation artifacts.

To download product.jwt, software.jwt, and the Notes/Domino web kits, you need at least one server with outbound connectivity to My HCL Software portal (MHS) and the HCL Domino fixlist servers.
Domino AutoUpdate a supports HTTP proxy configurations, including authenticated proxies, which should work in most enterprise network environments.
All downloads are validated against the software.jwt, which includes signed metadata for all supported software packages. This model fits most connected environments.

Completely air-gapped setups are uncommon, and to date, there haven’t been strong or clearly defined requirements for full offline AutoUpdate workflows.
However, it’s still possible to override download URLs in AutoUpdate documents to manually provide software.jwt and web kits from internal sources.

To support these scenarios, I created an NGINX-based download proxy that utilizes the documented MHS API.

Initially developed for the Domino Download Script, the proxy has evolved into a flexible tool that can be deployed in several modes:

• Internal software distribution portal
• Backend data source for the Domino Download Script
• Transparent proxy simulating the MHS API for Domino AutoUpdate

This makes it well-suited for secure environments requiring additional controls like antivirus scanning or staging downloads.

My personal use cases is all of the above to cache downloaded web-kits and host them from a local server.


I really appreciate your feedback and would like to hear about your specific requirements.
Please open a GitHub issue here for specific feedback.

GitHub Issues – Domino Start Script Project
https://github.com/nashcom/domino-startscript/issues

For very specific requirements, which cannot be discussed in public, ping me offline.


Related links:

Blog post introducing the download server:
https://blog.nashcom.de/nashcomblog.nsf/dx/new-project-domino-download-server.htm
Domino Download Server project on GitHub:
https://github.com/nashcom/domino-startscript/tree/main/domdownload-server

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