HOWTOs

For many users vi (the default editor for Alpine) is difficult and confusing to use. Even if that is not the case for you, if you find it helpful to have the same experience as others you wish to help, you might implement this for your own use as well. AUTHOR’s NOTE: I am guilty of not doing this. As usual, commands below are to be executed as root. Install nano apk add nano Add a profile snippet to make nano the default editor This change will apply to ‘sh’ (ask/bash/dash/etc) shells that are login shells, or sub-shells of a login shell.

While the LBU mechanism with backups allows restoring to previous state it lacks commented history. Done right, etckeeper will lead to a better record of what changes you made to the configuration and why, which improves your ability to recreate what you did, as well as understand why you did what you did. It also makes it easier to revert broken changes in a more granular fashion. Configure Git for the root user This is known as a ‘global’ configuration as ’local’ configuration refers to per-repository configuration.

Tracking configuration changes in etckeeper is great, but even better is storing in an off-system private repository, preferably one with a decent web interface to the repo (makes browsing the repo much friendlier). Ideally you will have a local git server for this rather than some cloud service. Since we only commit interactively (that is etckeeper autocommits are disabled), we don’t store passwords or use a passwordless SSH key on the system, which would be required if push without human intervention were required.

It can be especially useful to use network booting to create virtual machines without using install media on the VM. To do that we netboot with iPXE.

A guide to using rest-server top host repositories for restic-based backups, on a system running Alpine Linux.