Frood, an Alpine Initramfs NAS

3 hours ago

frood is an Alpine initramfs NAS that runs entirely from memory, offering fast boot times and reduced wear on storage devices.
The system is defined declaratively in a Git repository, allowing easy configuration changes by placing files in a root skeleton directory.
Deployment and rollback are straightforward with A/B boot options, using syslinux as the bootloader for simplicity.
Test deployments can be done using qemu, allowing full system testing before applying updates.
State persistence is minimal, only needed for RNG seeds and Tailscale configuration, stored on a separate USB drive.
The setup avoids complex DSLs and tools like Ansible, using simple scripts and Alpine's alpine-make-rootfs to build the initramfs.
The entire system, including service setup, is managed with standard Alpine tools, making configuration similar to regular Alpine systems.
The project is open-source but not yet a reusable project due to its simplicity and the desire to avoid unnecessary complexity.

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