I wrote a CLI for Foreman, that I creatively named foremancli.
It's now available as a gem, for easy installation.
To install, simply run:
$ gem install foremancli
For usage:

In the conf directory there must be a configuration file called distributions.

For the sake of simplicity, we are only defining one component to work with, called main. It works just like the main component of official repos from vendors like Debian and Ubuntu. (Note: for the time being we are not signing our packages just yet. Soon!)

The other directories will be created as needed by the tool that adds packages to the repo, reprepro. Therefore you do not need to worry about them.

Setting up httpd
Regardless of what httpd you choose to use, you want to allow for HTTP access to the /home/jason/apt-repo directory.
For apache use the following directory defintion:

Adding packages to repo
Adding packages to the repo is very easy:

If your packages are sane (which will be covered in another blog post!), you should have been able to install your packages without any problems.
Almost .... did you get an error about your repository being unsigned? Read on!

Signing the repo
Dpkg packages do not have the ability to be individually signed the way RPM packages do. Instead, the package publisher must sign the contents of the repo the package comes in order to validate the authenticity of the package.
The first step is to create a GPG key used to sign the repo. In the section below, the material in CAPS is example user input.
If you haven't done so already, secure the permissions of your .gnupg directory.

​We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

​You should be able to see the key now:

​It is the latter part of the pub key ID we are concerned about, in this case EE519117
We want to add the following line to the distributions file:

​The next time you add a package to the repo, add it with the following command:

Client configuration for the new key
You need to publish your key and have the clients install it in order to use it. You can extract it like so:

On your client machiness you can install it like so:

​You should be able to install packages with out any issues regarding security signatures!

​Future blog posts:
Multi component repos
Pass-phrase less repos (dangerous! but easy to manage in trusted environments)
Custom dpkg packages
Easy backporting of dpkg packages

​This month (April 13th) we gave a presentation to the NYC puppet User Group, on the node classification tool Foreman.

Joe Crobak, who attended wrote up an excellent blog post capturing our preso.

Foreman is an ENC system for puppet, which greatly enhanced Puppet’s functionality, by acting as a central datastore of node metadata, that assists in provisioning workflows. (It also handles bare metal provisioning, and VM image management, but we aren’t using it for that yet.)

We have been running the latest stable version (currently 0.2) of Foreman as our ENC (External Node Classifier) and really love it, and are working on contributing code to the project. (Which currently has over 20 active contributors).
​
* Project homepage: http://theforeman.org/
* Release notes: http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/ReleaseNotes
* Full Rest API docs (Read/write): http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/API
* Github: https://github.com/ohadlevy/foreman
* IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/theforeman (ohadlevy is the original author)

Colin Percival has gotten FreeBSD running on EC2. This is great news for all those BSD shops out their waiting for cloud support.

Amazon finally launched a much requested (at least by us) DNS service

Amazon also just raised their S3 object size limit to a whopping 5TB (from 5GB). Now the race is on to see our favorite tools get updated with multipart upload support.

The biggest news though is Amazon finally achieving PCI DSS 2.0 Validated Level 1 Service Provider status (for EC2, S3, EBS and VPC)

For you mobile devs out there don’t forget to check out Android and iOS SDKs, which allow you to point your mobile apps directly at S3, SimpleDB and SNS.

Amazon just announced a new instance type for High Performance Computing - relevant stats:
* 23 GB of memory
* 33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
* 1690 GB of instance storage
* 64-bit platform
* I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
* API name: cc1.4xlarge
Pricing is coming in at $1.60/hour