Raspberry Pi Headless Setup¶

This guide describes the installation of Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ as a headless server.

Download Raspbian Image¶

The latest Raspbian image can be downloaded from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/. In this case no desktop environment is needed so we use Raspbian Stretch Lite.

Extract the zip file by running the following command with adjusted date:

1 2	$ unzip 2018-11-13-raspbian-stretch-lite.zip $ rm 2018-11-13-raspbian-stretch-lite.zip

Write the image to the SD card¶

Run lsblk before and after inserting the SD card into the SD card reader in order to determine the NAME of the SD card. The device should be listed as sdX where X is a lower-case letter indicating the device.

If any partitions on the SD card are currently mounted (check the rightmost column of lsblk), unmount all of them.

1	$ umount /dev/sdX1

Write the image to the SD card with dd. if= specifies the image as the source file and of= specifies the SD card as the destination. Make sure to use the correct device to avoid data loss. The destination is specified by device name, not by partition name.

1	# dd bs=4M if=2018-11-13-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress conv=fsync

If any errors occur, try block size 1M instead of 4M

Optional: Checking whether the image was written correctly¶

The output of the dd command shows a number of written records (xxx+0 records in). Use this record count to copy the image back from the SD card to your local drive.

1	# dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdX of=from-sd-card.img status=progress count=xxx

Truncate the new image to the size of the original image and compare the new image with the original one.

1 2	# truncate --reference 2018-11-13-raspbian-stretch-lite.img from-sd-card.img $ diff -s from-sd-card.img 2018-11-13-raspbian-stretch-lite.img

Eject the SD card¶

Flush the write cache.

$ sync

Remove the SD card from the card reader.

Enable ssh for headless systems¶

Insert the SD card into the card reader. It will be mounted by defalt. Navigate to the boot partition of the SD card and create an empty file named ssh. The mountpoint of the boot partition can be determined via lsblk.

1 2	cd /run/media/$USER/boot touch ssh

Enable WIFI for headless systems¶

Source: raspberrypi.stackexchange.com

Insert the SD card into the card reader. It will be mounted by defalt. Navigate to the boot partition of the SD card. The mountpoint of the boot partition can be determined via lsblk.

1	$ cd /run/media/$USER/boot

Create a file named wpa_supplicant.conf with the following content:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=«your_ISO-3166-1_two-letter_country_code»

network={
    ssid="«your_SSID»"
    psk="«your_PSK»"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Replace «your_ISO-3166-1_two-letter_country_code» with your ISO Country Code, «your_SSID» with the SSID of your network and «your_PSK» with the corresponding wifi password.

Connect to the Raspberry Pi¶

Source: hackernoon.com

Establish an ssh connection to the Raspberry Pi with default credentials:

1 2	User: pi Password: raspberry

1	$ ssh pi@raspberrypi

If this does not initialize a connection, find out the IP either by running nmap -p 22 «subnet mask» on your local subnet or finding the device in the router's DHCP table.

You can now change the host name if you want. Replace raspberrypi by the new name in the following two files and reboot.

1
2
3

# vim /etc/hostname
# vim /etc/hosts
# reboot

Remove the message of the day

1	# echo "" > /etc/motd

If needed, configure the Raspberry Pi via the configuration script.

1	# raspi-config

Change the default root password.

1	# passwd root

Now create a new user for ssh access and allow sudo access for the new account. Don't remove sudo access for pi immediately. You can remove it once you have tested sudo with the new user account.

1 2	# adduser «user» # usermod -a -G sudo «user»

If you have sudo access with your new account, remove the default user pi.

1	# deluser -remove-home pi

For further ssh setup instructions visit Securing SSH Guide