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Alpine Toolbox

This is a little Alpine container I run to provide SSH logins with a bunch of tools.

Persistence

If /mnt/toolbox exists, toolbox will persist installed packages and system changes by using methods that already exist in arch.

Alpine Local Backup is pre-configured to use /mnt/toolbox/lbu.
Local APK cache is pre-configured to use /mnt/toolbox/apk.

It's important to lbu that your machine have a hostname. If you change hostnames, you will need to rename files in /mnt/toolbox/lbu.

podman run \
  --hostname toolbox \
  --volume /path/to/toolbox:/mnt/toolbox \
  git.woozle.org/neale/toolbox

First Run

You may want to podman exec into the container, in order to edit /etc/doas.conf set up user accounts, and/or install ssh authorized_keys.

Once set up, you should be able to ssh in for most of your needs.

Why This Exists

I run my server in Alpine's "diskless mode". The Raspberry Pi uses a MicroSD card, which will "wear out" after many writes. This means my system runs entirely in RAM.

However, I also like my creature comforts. Running a more robust installation in a container allows me to use my magnetic storage for the larger system, and install and remove packages when I like, without worrying about wearing out the MicroSD card.

Shout Out

Alpine Linux is cool. It provides all the difficult parts of this, I just had to set up some config files.

The really cool part is that my container works the same way as the host it runs on!