One of the best parts of maintaining a hobby server is setting it up. It’s fun to get everything working and figure out all of the quirks of the various pieces of software that have to work together on there. Once it’s working well, it’s a joy to let it sit, auto-update and handle its business for you. Conversely, the worst part of maintaining a hobby server is upgrading the underlying OS to a new release or migrating it to a new platform or machine.

One of the things I missed the most from my Debian/Ubuntu days when I switched to openSUSE about a year ago was apt-cacher-ng with proxy autodiscovery. I had apt-cacher-ng running on one computer at home, and all of my containers, VMs, and laptops would use that proxy when they were on the home network. Even better, they’d seemlessly switch back to the default repos if the proxy was unavailable. To be clear, what I want is to have my computers use apt-cacher-ng as a proxy when available to download packages.