Getting the latest version of Alpine Linux on Joyent

Joyent Triton Compute is a nice cloud service that includes a variety of common Linux distros as well as a particularly uncommon one (which also happens to be my personal favorite): Alpine Linux

Unfortunately, their version is woefully out of date (3.5), which opens you up to a number of security vulnerabilities including this one.

To upgrade to the latest version (3.8.1 as of this writing), create an instance with their out of date image and then ssh into it and run these commands:

apk update
apk upgrade --available
/etc/init.d/sshd stop
apk del openssh
sed -i -e 's/v3\.5/v3\.8/g' /etc/apk/repositories
apk update
apk upgrade --available
setup-sshd -c dropbear
reboot


You can run cat /etc/alpine-release to verify it worked