I have lots of computers in my house, all of which receive regular software updates. I get tired of waiting for all of these to download the same data, sometimes at the same time! I decided to use nginx to cache this data on my router to save time.
Once upon a time there was a tool called deborphan. It finds orphaned packages which could be removed from the system. You can maintain a list of ‘keepers’ to stop it suggesting removal of things that you want.
I wanted to extend this to work with the builtin “auto-installed” flag that aptitude stores for all packages. I also wanted it to work with Arch Linux.
I recently retired an old server of mine, cerberus. It was hosted in a remote data centre to which I have no physical access. My goal was to zero the drives before powering it off for the last time.