Zerotier on Aurora - Have I set it up the right way?

General
1

Hi All,
Just trying out this whole immutable os thing, and using Aurora as my OS. I’ve been using an old Chromebook (Asus C302C) and hardware support and drivers have been great out of the box, only thing not working is audio, but that’s a know issue on all Linux’s.

One thing I ran into was getting Zerotier set up on this machine, which is my preferred home-access VPN solution. I was able to get it working using rpm-ostree and layering the RPM on top, as per this page: Can't install Zerotier One in Fedora Silverblue! · Issue #1338 · zerotier/ZeroTierOne · GitHub. This is working well.

My question is - is this the best way to approach getting Zerotier set up? Is there an alternative I’m not aware of? I’m pretty new to ostree and immutable.
Kind Regards, Jay

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If you have your own system for building a custom image for yourself on GitHub (e.g. using GitHub - ublue-os/image-template: Build your own custom Universal Blue Image!), the easiest approach will be to use rpm-ostree to layer the RPM on top as part of your custom image build process.

Alternatively, (if I remember correctly) it should also be possible to run ZeroTier One in a Docker container as your VPN agent (and not merely as a detached network controller), using https://hub.docker.com/r/zerotier/zerotier - but I think you’ll have to make some additional decisions about integrating ZeroTier (e.g. to have it automatically start during boot).

I haven’t gotten around to checking my memory (about whether ZeroTier One’s Docker container can be used as a VPN agent) by trying that deployment approach on my Aurora system yet, because I’m lazy and Tailscale came preinstalled with Bluefin so I decided to use that instead for daily use in the past half-year. But I’ll need to set up ZeroTier on my system soon-ish because I have various other devices already on a ZeroTier network, which I’ll need to interact with again; I’ll update with my findings from trying to run ZeroTier One in a container as a VPN agent, but probably not in the next few weeks.

3

Thanks for the thoughts and feedback.

I’d rather not build a whole image for myself, that seems like a big hassle. Currently the rpm-ostree install zerotier-one method is working reliably, so I’ll stick with it for a while and see how I go.

Yeah, I considered switching to Tailscale, but I have quite a bit of stuff already set up with Zerotier so it would be quite a big move for me. Will possibly test out this route also, but it would take some time for me to swap.

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rpm-ostree install zerotier-one
can you help me?
when I try to run this I got an error " Packages not found: zerotier-one"

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You need to make sure rpmfusion is active and there is a zerotier there.

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curl -s \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/master/doc/contact%40zerotier.com.gpg \
| sudo tee /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zerotier

cat << 'EOF' | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/zerotier.repo
[zerotier]
name=ZeroTier, Inc. RPM Release Repository
baseurl=http://download.zerotier.com/redhat/fc/$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
EOF

rpm-ostree install zerotier-one
sudo rpm-ostree ex apply-live
sudo systemctl enable --now zerotier-one.service

I used these commands to make it work

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