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Deploy Alpine Linux on a headless system

Alpine Linux documentation assumes initial setup is carried-out on a system with a keyboard & display to interract with.
However, there are many cases where one might want to deploy a headless system, only available through a network connection (ethernet, wifi or as USB ethernet gadget).

This repo provides an overlay file to initially boot such headless system (leveraging Alpine distro's initramfs feature): it enables a basic ssh server to log-into from another Computer, in order to finalize system setup.

Install procedure:

Please follow Alpine Linux Wiki to download & create installation media for the target platform.
Tools provided here can be used on any plaform for any install modes (diskless, data disk, system disk).

Just add headless.apkovl.tar.gz1 overlay file at the root of Alpine Linux boot media (or onto any custom side-media) and boot the system.

With default network interface definitions (and SSID/pass file if using wifi), one may then access the system under ssh with: ssh root@<IP>
(system IP address may be determined with any IP scanning tools such as nmap).

As with Alpine Linux initial bring-up, root account has no password initially (change that after setup!).
From there, system install can be fine-tuned as usual with setup-alpine for instance (check wiki for details).

Add-on files may be added next to headless.apkovl.tar.gz to customise setup (sample files are provided):

  • wpa_supplicant.conf (mandatory for wifi usecase): define wifi SSID & password.
  • interfaces (optional): define network interfaces at will, if defaults DCHP-based are not suitable.
  • unattended.sh (optional): make custom automated deployment script to further tune & extend setup (backgrounded).

Note: these files are linux text files: Windows/macOS users need to use text editors supporting linux text line-ending (such as notepad++, BBEdit or any other).

Goody: seamless USB bootstrapping for PiZero devices (or similar which can support USB ethernet gadget networking):
Just add dtoverlay=dwc2 in usercfg.txt (or config.txt), and plug-in USB to Computer port.
With Computer set-up to share networking with USB interface as 10.42.0.1 gateway, one can log into device from Computer with ssh root@10.42.0.2 !...

Main execution steps are logged in /var/log/messages.

How to customize further ?

This repository may be forked/cloned/downloaded.
Main script file is headless.start.
Execute ./make.sh to rebuild headless.apkovl.tar.gz after changes.

Credits

Thanks for the initial guides & scripts from @sodface and @davidmytton.

  1. About bundled ssh keys: as this package is essentially intended to quickly bootstrap system in order to configure it, it purposely embeds some ssh keys so that bootstrapping is as fast as possible. Those (temporary) keys are moved in /tmp, so they will not be saved/reused once permanent configuration is set (with or without ssh server voluntarily installed in permanent setup). ↩︎