Alpine Linux:Ideas

This is the place to put feature requests and share ideas for Alpine. From these we'll create tickets in the issue tracking system. Discussions of ideas should probably take place on the Alpine-Devel mailing list, but feel free to use the discussion function of the wiki too.

Package manager

Ideas for apk-tools.

plugin for curl

A dlopened() download plugin that is linked to curl, which is used for remote repositories. By having it as a plugin we dont need libcurl in the initramfs.

wget (current behaviour) could be used as a fallback.

Booting

Booting from net

Priority: low

Provide ip address and remote hostname as kernel parameter and run directly from network. The only thing needed for this would probably be a special initramfs image.

Not sure how useful it would be, but it would be cool.

Installer

Installer templates

Have some "templates", or presseeds or something similar so you can easily install a lot of alpine boxes.

Installer for headless installs

Installer that would create a bootable iso/usbdrive + a working config. Could be written in wxWidgets so it could be run from either Windows or Linux.

Autorun program/script on CD

Could be nice with an autorun program that will be executed when cd is inserted in a windows computer. It could have a menu with the following options:

• create boot floppy for CDROM
• create boot floppy for USB
• install Alpine on an USB drive

Network installs

This is in-tie with headless installing and (at least for me) it's the big white elephant missing feature: to be able to run a server-based remote install of a system without any manual intervention. It might need an upgrade or the hardware could have been replaced after a failure. Driving there and reinstalling packages is a no-go in some places.

(Look at kickstart + cobbler + koan for RHEL as examples). If such a feature is ever add *please* make it compatible to something existing, i.e. even ubuntu is running with cobbler now).

20:46, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Infrastructure

Package database

A database with all the packages and their status.

Possibility to rate/vote packages? Some easy way for users to give feedback on what packages they think we should focus on.

Security

Protection against cold boot attacks

This is a subject that pages can be written about and everyone has a different opinion. AFAIK there's no real protection against it if your machine is powered on and unattended. Nonetheless limited protection could be afforded by overwriting RAM with zero's or random data whenever a reboot, halt or poweroff command is issued. Raised under Feature #2534

sysctl.conf changes

It seems by default many security features are already enabled, a few not enabled (checked on alpine 2.7.0) that would be a good idea to turn on are:

- TOCTOU prevention

- rfc1337

- magic-sysreq

I've already documented these on the sysctl.conf wiki page. Maybe we could enable these by default in new installs? Also, it would potentially be a good idea to enable the IPv6 privacy extensions via sysctl.conf, for those that do use IPv6. Raised as Feature #2535

Package suggestions

acf-unbound

An ACF interface for unbound DNS server would be awesome :) Raised as Feature #2537

macchanger

Adding macchanger (github page) package would be cool. Raised under Feature #2536

darkhttpd

Darkhttpd (http://unix4lyfe.org/darkhttpd/) is a very fast, lightweight http server for static content supporting http version 1.1 and automatically provides directory listings. It's also capable of very easily running as a daemon and in a chroot. Would make an excellent replacement to lighttpd for an Alpine mirror. Admittedly using darkhttpd without a package isn't difficult, but it does require installing development packages (apk add alpine-sdk) which is ~150MB on my test system, it would be awesome to have a package, including openRC service file so we can easily control the service. Raised as Feature #2538