I made myself to do regular maintenance of our moucha.cc node :) yesterday. I started do the usual stuff – unused package removal, inactive user removal, system update etc. and while doing it I found two tools for Gentoo linux which improved maintenance speed and effectivity.

Portage support for CDB improves greatly the speed of working with portage data – cache updates, searching etc. Howto set it up is on Gentoo Wiki.

The other tool is called “dep” and solves a lot of problems with package dependencies – reverse dependencies, unused version in slots, cleaning duplicates from world file etc. Check it out here: http://catmur.co.uk/~ed/main/my-bin/dep. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on my desktop sytem, because weird error with sed :( Hope I manage to get it working …

And btw … after some time of doing other things than system administration as main job, I found it quite enjoying to get into it again.