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Implementing RuckZuck.Cache for the Modern Workplace – Step by Step Guide to get Docker up and running for Windows Admins

In one of the projects I had to configure the Docker container infrastructure because the customer doesn’t have one. The first time this can be a little bit tricky, so I decided to share my knowledge in a step by step blog. I’m doing this because I need the RuckZuck.Cache from Roger Zander.

RuckZuck.tools is one of the great projects of Roger Zander and helps companies to get free and opensource applications from a cloud repository without the need of repackaging them. It’s highly recommended to also contribute to this project if you have open source apps which are not already in the repository. RuckZuck Cache is caching installation files in your network and helps to lower internet traffic from your company network.

Important is, that you have the responsibility to check if the packages work in your environment. There is no liability by RuckZuck or somebody else, it’s like when you downloaded the apps from the publisher’s page and then deployed them.

We are using this project in our modern managed workplace projects with Intune and Syntaro. Syntaro is used as a private repository for Win32 apps, which require product keys or specific configuration and are normally not deployable over Intune. RuckZuck is also integrated in Syntaro, so you can easily deploy packages from both repositories to your devices.

Configure Server 2016 for Docker

Install Docker Community Edition
https://download.docker.com/win/stable/Docker%20for%20Windows%20Installer.exe
Do not switch to Windows containers because RZCache is running in a Linux environment.
The installation takes a few minutes.
When the installation has finished, you must log out and log in again.
When you are signed in again, then you can right click the tray icon and open the “Settings”.
Now Docker is asking to install and configure Hyper-V on the machine. Click on “ok”

The server will automatically reboot.

When Docker starts the first time you will see the following Welcome Screen, which you can close.

Sometimes it took some time in my lab until Docker could start, restarting Docker helped and the service was up and running.

Configure Internet Proxy if needed

If you don’t have a proxy then you can skip the next two steps. Otherwise open the settings to configure the Proxy in Docker.
Enter your Proxy Server address and save the configuration.

Install Kitematic

Installing Kitematic is not required, but it helps configuring containers in a UI.

You can just click on “Kitematic” in the Tray menu.

 

If Kitematic is not installed you will get a download button.

Just download it and extract the Zip Contents to “c:\Program Files\Docker\Kitematic”.

After that Kitematic should be started when you click on Kitematic in the Docker menu.

Installing RuckZuck Cache

Start CMD or PowerShell with Admin Rights
Now we can pull the image from docker hub with the following command:

docker pull zanderr/ruckzuck

With this command you can start the docker container and already configure the most important things:

D: should be your data drive on the Windows server. The files are then cached in this location.

Hostname.domain.com: Should be the FQDN of the container host server.

Docker will ask in the process if the D: drive can be shared with the container. Select “Share it”

mkdir d:\rzcache

docker run –name RZCache -d -e “localURL=http://hostname.domain.ch:5000″ -p 5000:5000/tcp -p 5001:5001/udp -v d:/rzcache:/app/wwwroot zanderr/ruckzuck

When the download has finished, open Kitematic and switch to the settings page of the container
Configure at least:

If needed the Proxy

We recommend also to set the RZUser and RZPW

Check access from other computers in your network by navigating to the localURL in a Browser The Webpage should return:

“RuckZuck-Proxy (c) 2018 by Roger Zander; Version: 1.0.3”

Configure the clients

The simplest way is to configure the URL trough MSI setup with the MSI parameter WEBSERVICE. The Intune app will then look like in the following example:

Testing

The easiest way to test the infrastructure is to run a few commands on a client which has the provider installed:

Find-Package -ProviderName RuckZuck -Contains "Zip"

Install-Package -ProviderName RuckZuck "7-Zip"

You can verify, that the cache was used by checking the cache directory which we redirected to Windows. If there are files and folders, all is working as expected:

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