Boot Journal

Fixing USB Gadget Networking on a Pi Zero 2W (When cloud-init Keeps Undoing Your Config)

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:10:29 -0700

I set up a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W as a small USB gadget device — plug it into a laptop, get a network interface, SSH in. Simple in theory. In practice, every reboot quietly erased my network config, and it took a while to figure out why.

The symptom

I’d configure usb0 with a static IP, reboot to confirm it stuck, and find it gone. Not broken — gone, reset back to whatever the image shipped with. No errors, no obvious culprit in the logs I was looking at first. Just a config that refused to stay changed.

Welcome to Boot Journal

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:28:17 -0700

This is the first post on Boot Journal, a place for tech notes and write-ups.

A quick word on who is writing these: I am Johannes. By day I work in education; by night (and most weekends) I run a small homelab, tinker with Mac and Linux setups, and experiment with local AI tools. Somewhere along the way I became the kind of person who runs a Proxmox host in a closet, with a small fleet of machines stitched together with Tailscale doing jobs they were never originally sold to do.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Johannes. By day I work in education; by night (and most weekends) I run a small homelab, tinker with Mac and Linux setups, and experiment with local AI tools.

Somewhere along the way I became the kind of person who runs a Proxmox host in a closet. What started as curiosity about how a home network actually works turned into a small fleet of machines stitched together with Tailscale, all doing jobs they were never originally sold to do. My daily driver is a Mac, and I’ve made my peace with the fact that the terminal still calls it by the wrong name because I never bothered fixing an old hostname typo. Homebrew is where most of my setup lives — the whole rhythm of brew install and brew bundle that makes a fresh machine feel like home again. I split my time between macOS and Linux and like understanding the seams between them: what translates cleanly, and what breaks in interesting ways.