Subject: Creating an overlay file manually

From: Sébastien Maccagnoni <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2021 12:13:21 +0100

Hello,

I'm trying to install Alpine on a Mele A2000G (Allwinner A10 ARMv7 CPU),
*headlessly*.

I think I have succeeded in creating the bootable card, because:

- I see a DHCP request on the network, a few seconds after powering on
- when pinging (infinitely) what I think is its IP address, it starts
answering at the exact same time
- if I power on without the SD card, the default Android system does not
answer to pings
- this is reproductible with 100% accuracy, so it's probably not a weird
coincidence

But I have no way to get access to the system (well, I could open the case
and hack into the serial port, but I would rather not do that).

I then had the idea to create an overlay file which should instruct Alpine
to install an OpenSSH server. I may be wrong when creating it.

I have the following content in etc/apk/world:

---
alpine-base
musl
libcrypto1.1
openssh-keygen
openssh-server-common
zlib
openssh-server
---

I have added a symlink from etc/runlevels/default/sshd to /etc/init.d/sshd.

And then recreated the alpine.apkovl.tar.gz file and put it at the root of
the filesystem.

Here are the notes I have taken while doing all this:
https://pastebin.com/WsBbpte6

Could someone provide guidance and tell me if I did something wrong?

Thanks!

-- 
Sébastien
https://www.maccagnoni.eu/