Alpine Linux eeePC

Today was a public holiday so I decided to crack the old eeePC out and try and set up something useful on it.

I already had a doom emacs and ssh set up so it was just a matter of plugging it in to get going. One of the first things I wanted to do was get it on my tailscale netwrork. Once I had that working I’d be able to ssh into it even when I’m not on my home network. Tailsclae is a breeze to setup.

Setting up Tailscale in Alpine Linux

1. Uncomment the community repository in /etc/apk/repositories. See the docs.
2. apk update
3. apk install tailscale
4. rc-update add tailscale default
5. rc-service tailscale start
6. login using tailscale up

It’s that simple. After that was setup I confirmed that I could ssh from my phone while not on my network. After that I started setting up Syncthing, which was a little more problematic.

Syncthing

By default syncthing runs as syncthing. I couldn’t figure out the best way to edit the config or share the folders so my regular user could see them and interact. Instead I was able to figure out how to get Syncthing to run as my user. These are the steps I took.

1. apk add syncthing
2. Edit the Syncthing config at ~/.config/syncthing/config.xml
3. Find the line 127.0.0.1:8384 and change it to listen on 0.0.0.0:8384 This will open up syncthing on the network to be accesible from other machines.
4. sudo vim /etc/conf.d/syncthing
5. Add SYNCTHING_USER=User. Where User is the user name you want syncthing to run as.
6. Change owner chown user:users /var/lib/syncthing to allow your user to have access to syncthing.
7. sudo rc-update add syncthing default will ensure syncthing starts as a background service.
8. sudo rc-service syncthing start will start the service rightaway.
9. On another machine in the same network navigate to http://syncthing%5Fhost:8384. You should now be able to setup syncthing through the gui.
10. In settings remember to add a user and password to lock down the gui.