Rasp-Cleaner

an Ansible playbook to quickly remove excess packages and services which are not needed for eth facing home server functionality.

What is removed?

• Wlan
• Bluetooth
• Printers
• Desktop environment
• Games
• Audio

Installation

Ansible and its dependencies

On mac these can be installed with Homebrew brew install ansible Or it can be installed with pip pip install ansible

Usage

Ensure you can form a ssh connection to target machine

Clone this repository and navigate to it

To run the whole playbook:

• ansible-playbook -i <ADDRESS>, -u <USER> playbook.yml

To run parts of the playbook:

• ansible-playbook -i <ADDRESS>, -u <USER> playbook.yml --tags "<comma,separated,list,of,tags>"

Valid tags are:

• printer
• wifi
• bluetooth
• desktop
• email
• sound
• webcam
• games
• logging
• journald
• auto

Disclaimer

Playbook is a work in progress alpha product and will propably break something when ran except in certain use cases

After thoughts

Running this playbook leaves the "victim" machine in quite nice state if one does not need the services we're removing here. Running ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -30 to list top 30 most memory consuming processes gives a list that needs no actual cleaning. Next steps would be to disable Pi-hole web interface and switch from Tailscale to bare Wireguard.

systemd-journal using the most memory seems quite strange.

After tracking down what might be the cause of this I found out tailscale is flooding my journalctl. I utilized this chatGPT generated command to demonstrate it:

journalctl | awk 'BEGIN{count=0} {if($0 ~ /tailscale/) count++} END{print "Total Lines: " NR; printf "Matched Lines: %d\n", count; printf "Percentage: %.2f%%\n", (count/NR)*100}'

This was the output:

Total Lines: 59777
Matched Lines: 35931
Percentage: 60.11%

Options to fix this are changing to Wireguard or changing logging rules for Tailscale. Here is a "fix" to disable Tailscale flooding journal logs.

This didn't solve the memory usage issue.

Modifying /etc/systemd/journald.conf by adding SystemMaxUse=50M line after [journal] I have now succesfully got it off the top of my memory consumption list. This has its own flaws but fits my use case. Also this new smaller size doesn't get flooded by Tailscale anymore so it should be enough.

This change is now automatically implemented in this commit

Sources

This was built for my own use and as an course exercise for course

• chatGPT