Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak into the earliest parts of the boot process, swap the startup config without breaking anything, and leave without a trace.
Are you ready? Let's begin.
the setup
In which our heroes are introduced, and the scene is set.
For a very long time I had a beat-up old ThinkPad that couldn’t hold a charge for the life of it, especially when running Windows. It tended to die a lot when I was traveling, and I travel a lot. To save battery when I’m away from home, I often ssh back into my home desktop, both so I have persistent state even if my laptop battery dies, and so I get much faster builds that don’t kill the battery.
This has two small problems:
Sometimes my home loses power and the desktop shuts off. Sometimes when the power comes back on it has a new public IP.
For a long time I solved 1. by enabling “Power On" after "Restore AC Power Loss” in the BIOS and 2. with tailscale. However, I recently installed Arch with an encrypted boot partition, which means that boot doesn’t finish until I type in the encryption password.
Well. Well. What if I Simply put tailscale in initramfs?
the plan
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