"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Sunday, 15 January 2017

New toy on the desk: Raspberry PI 3


Just before Christmas I've been to a “traditional” electronics and surplus fair, here in Genoa, and bought myself, among other things, a Raspberry PI 3 (version B) board. My goal is to replace, as home server, the Raspberry PI I bought two years ago in order to take advantage of the more computing power offered by the new board. Additionally the older board will be set free for more “experimental” experiments. As “accessories” to my new Raspberry board I bought a (clear) plastic case, a 16GB micro SD card and en external 2.5'' USB hard disk.

Installation and first tests

I first downloaded latest Raspbian release, the “Lite” version since I'm going to use it as a headless server. Like I did last time I copied the disk image on the 16GB SD card using the “dd” command.
sudo dd if=2016-11-25-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdd
All worked fine but I had to fix a couple of things. The image I copied at the first tentative didn't boot, I had to remove all memory card partitions using Gparted then repeat the copy process. The disk copied after the second tentative works fine, I don't know if problem was because a failure in the first copy or because of how the card was pre-formatted.
The latest Raspbian release has SSH demon disabled by default to enable it I had just to add an empty “ssh” named file on the memory card root folder.
touch /media/maxx/boot/ssh
After enabling SSH I've eventually managed to connect to Raspberry PI 3 using SSH. I first changed the “pi” user default password then I started the raspi-config utility in order to expand the SSD boot partition to the full 16GB disk
and change the host name to a very imaginative one
at last, to test the future server complete configuration, I plugged the external USB disk and mounted it manually (automatic mount is not enabled and I'm not going to enable it).
sudo mkdir /media/usbdisk
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/usbdisk
Now what?

In the immediate future I'm going to install and configure on the new Raspberry MiniDLNA and all other applications I currently use on the old one. Than I'll be free to start experimenting with both the 'Berries.

No comments :

Post a Comment