Guide: Alpine Linux as an alternative rescue system using a custom iPXE script

Bare Metal and VPS
1

Hi,

I wrote an iPXE script that can be used to boot your bare metal server into an Alpine Linux rescue system. To use it, simply follow the documentation on custom iPXE scripts.

I'm sharing the current version (I might update the gist later) here as well, the really nice part IMHO is the support of SSH keys, making it very easy to use even on servers without a KVM console.

#!ipxe

echo Booting Alpine Linux rescue


Used below for SSH keys


set space:hex 20

set space ${space:string}

set arch x86_64


#set version edge

set version latest-stable

#set mirror https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine

set mirror https://alpinelinux.mirrors.ovh.net


To see the whole boot process, adjust the console parameters based on what


you see in the official rescue's /proc/cmdline


#set console console=tty0${space}console=ttyS0,115200n8


Enable the community repository for ripgrep


set repo-url ${mirror}/${version}/main,${mirror}/${version}/community

set packages bash,curl,file,lsblk,mount,parted,ripgrep,vim,wget

set ssh_key ssh-ed25519${space}AAAAxxxxxxxxxx


set base-url ${mirror}/${version}/releases/${arch}/netboot


imgfree

kernel ${base-url}/vmlinuz-lts initrd=initrd.magic ${console} ip=dhcp alpine_repo=${repo-url} modules=loop,squashfs modloop=${base-url}/modloop-lts pkgs=${packages} ssh_key="${ssh_key}"

initrd ${base-url}/initramfs-lts

boot

This is very light and can even be used on 2G memory servers:

localhost:~# free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           1.9G       52.6M        1.6G      262.5M      296.8M        1.5G
Swap:             0           0           0