So I am experimenting with running a Pi Zero 2w with Alpine Linux as a headless server on my home network and so far I’ve succeeded in flashing the sd card and connecting via ssh via the documentation for setup on raspberry pis and the documentation for headless setup. But after I run “setup-alpine” and reboot I can’t get access via ssh since I get “Permission denied” after entering the password trying to log into root or a user account.

So far I’ve had a look at setting “PermitRootLogin” in /etc/sshd/sshd_config to “yes” and that seems to work, however after a reboot the pi is somehow not visible anymore over the network. I also asked AI and it said that by default Alpine uses dropbear for ssh instead of openssh and the latter could be more strict when it comes to permissions. I’m not so familiar with the workings of ssh so it may just be me doing something wrong or forgetting something during the so I’m asking if anyone here has is familiar with the process or has an idea.