Headless raspberry pi on the network

A raspberry pi finally arrived. Amazing embedded linux platform for very little money.

I'm not really interested in using it to drive a TV, but more as an embedded device for some ham radio project, so I wanted to get it on the network in a headless configuration that I could easily locate. Here's what I did:

• Grabbed the recommended Debian Squeeze image from here.
• Wrote it to an 8GB SD card using dd on the mac as per instructions here.
• Mounted the card and enabled remote ssh by "sudo mv /boot/boot_enable_ssh.rc /boot/boot.rc"
• Unmounted the card, stuck it in the raspberry pi, connected ethernet
• On my Mac, did an "arp -a" to note the network devices on my lan
• Powered up the raspberry pi (I'm using an iPhone charger which seems to work fine)
• Waited a few minutes, until the lights stabilised, did another "arp -a" and looked for new ip addresses
• In my case "ssh pi@10.0.1.16" (but your address will be different) {password is 'raspberry'}
• I'm in! For convenience I create my own user account using "sudo useradd -m USERNAME" and then add the account to /etc/sudoers

The Debian image only uses 2GB of my 8GB card, so I followed the instructions here to resize the root partition up to use it all. After a reboot, it looks like this:

I prefer not to give things fixed IP addresses so to make it easy to locate on the network I install avahi-server with "sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon". Then I add the following configuration file as /etc/avahi/services/ssh.service

Now I can simply "ssh raspberrypi.local" to log in.

I must be getting old, but it's astonishing that I'm using a computer for under $50 that is much more powerful than systems I used to share with dozens of users only a few decades ago.

Now to think of a good application for it!