Common tricks to reduce Space on AWS nano:

My goal is to improve my writing skill and also to try to stay a bit organized in the process. So, I will start off with a rant about aws troubles I faced today.

Welp, I have been running IRC bouncers on AWS servers for the past 2 years now. Given my current lifestyle I cannot really afford to own a dedicated machine at a dedicated place for a long period. The constant maintainance of a machine is something that is impossible for a nomadic like lifestyle of mine.

Something like a bitcoin node is easily possible to run on a laptop without having the need to be constantly online, but IRC bouncers require me to always stay online. So, I got a AWS nano machine to run a IRC bouncer for me. The nano is machine is minimal with 8Gb of space. So, I started on the quest to hunt for things that could save me space. At start of this process, I was using about 6.9 Gb of 8 Gb in my system.

Culprit 1: Unused kernel images

Seems like AWS sneekily was updating the machine images /usr/src/linux-aws-headers-*. These could be removed with Stack overflow answer.

Culprit 2: Log files

I also found it useful to contain the log file sizes used by systemd. This answer deals with rotating log files for system with journalctl.

Someday, I will settle down at a somewhat permanent location and will finally try out the bitcoin on lightning.

Culprit 3: Snap files

Snap files are used as a way to distribute linux applications. Snap maintains 3 versions of old applications incase things go wrong. This answer shows how to reduce the revisions of the same application that are saved.

Conclusion

Now, I am back to 3.19Gb of space on my nano :) ended up saving about ~3.8 Gb overall without compramising at all.