I got my “Raspberry PI Starter Kit”:http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00AD12VLW/ this week. The Kit is very nice, as it comes packaged with everything you need in order to get your PI up and running ASAP. Just plugin the SD-Card, connect Ethernet cable and USB Power supply and your ready to go!
h2. Booting Up
After the PI has booted from the provided Image on the SD-Card, it is accessible through SSH:
ssh [email protected]
It’s a good idea to copy the SSH public key to the machine, so that you do not have to type in the passphrase everytime:
ssh [email protected] "mkdir -p .ssh"
scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub [email protected]:.ssh/authorized_keys
When the provided Raspberry PI distro is outdated, you can update it with the builtin admin tool:
sudo raspi-config
=> select update, exit
sudo reboot
h2. Bootstrap for Puppet
As an experiment, I wanted to provision my PI with “Puppet”:http://puppetlabs.com/. Since the PI comes packaged with Python as a programming language, you need to install Ruby in order to run Puppet.
There are several Ruby Versions available as Debian packages, but I wanted to try out “RBenv”:https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv just for fun. This is only an option if you have plenty of time, cause building a Ruby from source takes round about 2 hours…
# update aptitude
sudo apt-get update -y
# install some basics like git and support for ruby to compile and puppet to work
sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev git-core curl libyaml-dev -y
# clone the rbenv repo and setup the env
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.profile
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.profile
exec $SHELL -l
# add the ruby-build plugin and install a ruby 1.9.3
git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
rbenv install 1.9.3-p327
# set the ruby as the global ruby version
rbenv global 1.9.3-p327
rbenv rehash
# check if it's working fine
ruby -v
# add the rbenv sudo plugin
git clone git://github.com/dcarley/rbenv-sudo.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/rbenv-sudo
Having a running Ruby, installing Puppet is just a matter of minutes, as it is distributed as a Ruby Gem. It’s a good idea though to “disable RDoc and RI documentation generation”:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1381725/how-to-make-no-ri-no-rdoc-the-default-for-gem-install to speed up the installation:
# puppet needs it's own user and group
sudo useradd --comment "Puppet" --no-create-home --system --shell /bin/false puppet
# disable documentation generation for gems
echo "gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc" > ~/.gemrc
# install the gem
gem install puppet
# make puppet executables available through rbenv
rbenv rehash
# check if facter is installed properly
facter
If facter complains about a problem with the fact fqdn, just add a real hostname to /etc/hosts:
sudo vi /etc/hosts
127.0.1.1 raspberrypi.nofail.de raspberrypi
h2. First Puppet run
After that puppet should run without warnings and you can start writing the first manifest:
mkdir /home/pi/puppet
cd /home/pi/puppet
vi base.pp
Add this to base.pp to install VIM to the Raspberry PI:
package { "vim":
ensure => installed,
}
This manifest can be applied with rbenv sudo:
rbenv sudo puppet apply base.pp
Et voila, VIM is installed on your PI.
h2. Samba
Working with the tools on my Mac is cool, so sharing a directory on the PI is a nice way of editing locally and running stuff on the server. Deriving from “a basic installation of Samba”:http://baleinoid.com/whaly/2012/06/rpi-sharing-files-between-the-raspberry-pi-and-a-computer-with-windows-7-home/ that’s what needs to be done on the PI:
# install samba
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin
# update config
sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf
In /etc/samba/smb.conf uncomment line security = user and add the following section:
[Puppet] comment = Puppet share path = /home/pi/puppet writeable = yes guest ok = no
Once you did this, add a Samba user and restart the service:
# make shared dir writable
chmod 777 /home/pi/puppet
# add the user for access over smb
sudo smbpasswd -a pi
# restart smb
sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart
Using ⌘+k on the Mac connects to a remote server. Enter smb://[email protected] and connect to the Puppet share. You can now access your files via open /Volumes/Puppet/.
h2. DynDNS
In order to access the PI over the internet, subscribing to a free Dynamic DNS service like “NO-IP”:http://www.no-ip.com/ is a nice way to get a static hostname for name resolution.
NO-IP has some “Tools available for download”:http://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php?page=mac that help you keeping the switching IP up to date. Since the provided binaries did not work on the PI, the NO-IP client needs to be “compiled from source”:http://support.no-ip.com/customer/portal/articles/363247-installing-the-linux-dynamic-update-client-on-ubuntu.
On my Airport Extreme I enabled “port-forwarding”:https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3414 so that i can route services to the PI.
h2. WiFi
If you want the PI to connect to your wireless network, just buy yourself a “mini wifi USB adapter”:http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B003MTTJOY/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1. It’s pretty easy to get the PI up and running with this on your local wifi, just enable the network device in _/etc/network/interfaces_, mine looks like this:
# /etc/network/interfaces auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-conf /etc/wpa.config auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp
and add the wifi connection settings to _/etc/wpa.config_:
# /etc/wpa.config
network={
ssid="YOUR_SSID"
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
}
Raspberry PI with cream and sugar!