Introduction
This post is the first of a series of posts about my adventures with a Raspberry Pi computer that now lives in the cellar along with the many boxes of things that “might be useful one day”.
When I was made redundant back in April, I bought a Raspberry Pi computer to play with while I was finding a new job. I had wanted to set up up a low-power always on server and finally had the time to do something about it.
Planning
The server should fulfil the following requirements:
- Be always on, so must be low power.
- Act as a central file store.
- Host Redmine for bug tracking.
- Run TVHeadEnd to make and serve recordings of TV.
- Be able to act as a media server.
Previously, I had tried most of this on an old PC that was running Linux Mint 13 and it was all working well. As the Raspberry Pi could also run a Debian based distro, I was pretty confident that this would all work well with minimal effort.
I wasn’t bothered about any particular order of implementation but the obvious first thing to try out was the hardware.
Setting up the Raspberry Pi
The first thing I did when I the Raspberry Pi arrived was to verify that all the important things on the board were working. The details of what I did to get the Raspberry Pi running are basically those listed on the official Raspberry Pi website Quick Start guide and I used the Raspbian distro image from the Raspberry Pi download page. I then used the Fedora ARM Image Installer to load the image on an 8GB SD card, plugged everything in and waited for it to explode! Needless to say, it all worked fine.
Once I’d proved all the hardware was working, I played around with the various GUI applications. I was pleasantly surprised by how well most applications performed and it proved to be quite a capable box.
Configuring the Raspbian image as a server
After I reloaded the clean Raspbian image to the SD card, I booted the Pi
and set the following boot options:
1. Expand file system.
8.2. Hostname set to <HostName>
8.4. Enable SSH.
8.5. Update – to make sure it is all updated before doing anything.
Notes:
- The numbers refer to the boot options shown on the first time run screen that comes with the Raspbian image.
- I did not enable the GUI as I want this to be an always on server administered remotely from my main PC.
After rebooting, I verified that I could login using ssh and we were good to go.
The next post will be about setting up TvHeadEnd as that was what I wanted to do next.
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