I have decided to have another look. Here are my notes, since re-factoring the old page seems a bit of a chore. And now part three, I may need to rebuild the OS image from scratch.

Creating a Boot disk

It is possible to make the Pi perform a first time boot with sshd enabled for use if the Pi is headless. Do,

touch /boot/ssh

The ip address can be discovered using the router.

Plugging it in again

I’d forgotten that plugging it in is obvious although power is micro USB. Fortunately I had recorded the critical parameters, the login still works.

APT & Raspian

I moved forward from a two year old Jessie OS image to Stretch, I find that often I came across the apt-get hangs, a lot, feature. It seems it’s short of resources. I have made further comments on Raspbian & APT on this wiki and deleted the rest from this page in March 2020.

To Do

I turned tor off also, I wrote a new check_service script using the service command to examine the running services and service tor stop to stop it. I found this helpful. But it restarts on reboot … I have forgotten how to fix this and the little f*cker now seems to have systemd. I have run systemctl disable tor, let’s see if that works

The desktop is barfed, it is missing all the icons; this talks about it. Do I need to uninstall and reinstall the desktop? What is the desktop? (Actually this went away once, I got to the status of a complete update!)

I have installed imagemagick , baobab and removed libreoffice. I have also installed lshw and locate.

I haven’t remembered how the “pi” advertises it’s hostname. I have upgraded samba, because it seems to come with a name daemon of some description and when I ran apt-get install, it said it needed to upgrade the samba package; samba is also documented on this page on the raspberry site and can now ‘see’ the pi on the network window. And now I can’t! I mucked around with the smb.conf file, so I remove and install.

Shall I uninstall wolfram-engine? It seems to be a programming environment. Yes! Stretch is quite big.

Backup

How to back it up. See here at stack exchange. The suggest this,

sudo dd if=/path/to/your/WIN10.ISO of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress; sync

so is that if=/. I exported / using samba but imgburn fails with network errors and disk imager doesn’t recognise the device that I mounted it on. I found this to use ssh,

ssh hostname@my.ip.address "sudo dd if=/dev/sdX " | \
  dd of=/home/username/Documents/filename.image`

Customisation

Check https://github.com/dfl1955/ubuntu-tools, there are useful tools in that repo.

I have installed Raspi Check and Juice SSH on my phone. I had to add my login user to Raspi Check’s assumed default group. Shall I install Zabbix somewhere? It might help monitoring the speed of the web sites. I chose to use uptime robot.

Reliability

This seems a bit shit and seems to be a problem with the electricity supply quality. This article on the raspbian community site recommends buying a quality transformer. Using google with the search key “raspberry pi ups” comes back with a bunch of suggestions. I supect that powertop isn’t the answer to this problem.

DDNS

I need this for this purpose; here’s how to geek on the subject, hope it’s UK relevant. This recommends using the router’s DDNS interface.  In my case, I use BT, and they have a specific list that they claim to work with. I chose one of them; if I had wanted to use something else I could have used the alternate configuration of needing an agent and port forwarding records on the router.

No-ip has a software tool , this is called a dynamic update client, to let them know the address is still in use. It is installed using wget|untar|make.  I have written a noip2.service file which is stored at my github repo. This should be working and is something Zabbix could help with as might raspicheck. The no-ip daemon doesn’t seem to be working, asked to confirm again. Need to check this out.

UTServer

Google is my friend, google: how to run a bit torrent server on raspbian

https://eltechs.com/run-utorrent-on-raspberry-pi/

https://www.howtogeek.com/142044/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-an-always-on-bittorrent-box/

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Raspian & APT

2 Replies

  1. I now have a Raspberry Pi, on the internet, but it’s running Jessie and I am advised to upgrade to Stretch; this is good advice but I am fearful for apt & apt-get, it frequently hangs the machine. I am trying to make a backup.

    Can I use a disk partitioning tool to create space for a nas mount to hold the output from a disk clone opperation using dd, or something else?

  2. The thing has failed. It was during a apt transaction; it seems my weekly invocations were not happening. The system could not be pinged. i shall redo the page as I try to repair the little box.

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