Although there are utilities such as dpkg-deb for managing .deb packages, they can also be manipulated by the standard set of archival utilities: tar, ar, and gzip. This article will lead you through extracting the contents of a .deb file, making modifications to the installation scripts and default configuration files, then repackaging.
It is common in secure production datacenters for internal hosts to be forced to go through a reverse proxy for public internet access. The same concept can be applied to apt package management, where setting up a centralized package proxy enables caching as well as security controls. In a datacenter where you could have hundreds … Ubuntu: A centralized apt package cache using Apt-Cacher-NG
It is common in secure production datacenters for internal hosts to be forced to go through a reverse proxy (e.g. Squid) for public internet access. The same concept can be applied to apt package management, where setting up a centralized package proxy enables caching as well as security controls. In a datacenter where you could … Ubuntu: A centralized apt package cache using squid-deb-proxy