Welcome to World-Wide Exptools, the place for secured automatic updates of Open Source binaries. Automatic updates are retrieved using Not-So-Bad Distribution (NSBD), secured by "Pretty Good(Tm) Privacy" (PGP(Tm)) or GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) digital signatures, and efficiently transferred by rsync.

Exptools began inside AT&T Bell Labs in 1982 as a means to distribute software between researchers and developers. It has been growing ever since, and in April 1999 it began expanding to the internet. Packages are maintained by individual volunteers within Bell Labs called "providers" who remotely compile the software on multiple computers and install the resulting binaries which are automatically redistributed.

Follow this link to get the wwexptools packages.

Within the company, there is additional software called RUG (for Remote Update Gateway) on top of NSBD that provides a lot of the value that users perceive, such as:

• Package providing can be done from any machine that gets automated updates, and providers can do remote compilation for all the supported machine types.
• Administration of packages in the collection is centralized. This includes permissions for which paths those packages may touch and which providers may modify the packages.
• It is very easy to add new machines to the distribution: end machines simply download a snapshot of the whole toolset, and run a small script and they get secured automatic updates from then on, including new packages. No super-user privileges are required beyond creating a login.
• Administration of updates to the end machine is centralized: the update logs of each end machine are sent back to a central machine where they are automatically analyzed for problems. The central administrator then either fixes the problem or contacts the end machine's administrator to fix it.
• Multi-tiered updates: any machine in the distribution can be set up to distribute to other machines, to put the minimum load on long-distance network links. Each machine locates its server by querying the central machine where a small table is maintained by the central administrator.
• Backup copies of critical distribution system components are kept to guard against the eventuality of an update to the distribution system breaking all further updates.
• Automated audits are done each night to ensure that nothing has been modified from the central distribution other than those explicitly requested by the end machine's administrator (which is only rarely done).