I’ve been evaluating Hashicorp’s Nomad for some time now, to see if it would be a decent replacement for the myriad of docker-compose files I have laying around. I used to have a setup where I would have lots of services defined in docker-compose files, and they would be run on a set of servers manually. I’d store each docker-compose.yml and its accompanying files in a repo for each service. This quickly became unmaintainable.

I currently own 4 PCEngines APU boards (2x apu and 2x apu2) which I find perfect for use as low-power servers or routers. For this reason, I like to run a lightweight Linux distro called Alpine Linux. Besides being lightweight I also find this distro quite simple and easy to contribute to. In this post, I’ll be documenting my steps to getting Alpine Linux running on my boards. These embedded boards don’t have any form of graphical output, simply a serial console port.

Recently I’ve migrated from an EdgeRouter Lite-3 home router to a debian stretch LXD container running on a server. There are a number of reasons I did this, and I’ll go over them some other time. For now, I just want to share with you an amusing story about using a tool a friend of mine made called conntracct. Conntracct is a program that takes conntrack accounting events and pushes them to some kind of sink, in my case, I am sending conntrack data to an influxdb instance over UDP.