Adventures in Pi

Last year an old friend of mine asked if I had my mitts on a Rasberry Pi yet.  On hearing this my wife understood that there was an uber geeky piece of tech which might keep me busy for a bit, and further decided that this was to be my christmas present. Unfortunately I have had very limited tinker time to get to my Pi, until this week. Being on school holidays and coming down with a man flu I have had the perfect opportunity to sit and fiddle a while.

Aim

I thought I would make a simple web server. I'm going to be original and try to break away from the LAMP stack.  The first reason I want to break away is because I really want to avoid the P - Perl or PHP and go for pure python as a server language.  The second reason is that I know that there are other options besides mySQL and Apache for the web server, and database server, I want to think about these as I go along.

Task 1 The first boot.

To be fair I have already booted the machine already I have just forgotten the pasword. This was a simple task of downloading the disk image from the raspberry pi downloads page.  The dd command does the job of converting the image onto the disk.

I did however use the disk utility to take a backup image from the disk after this point in order that recovery was a little easier.

Task 2 Connecting to my network

This should have been much easier. In order to connect to my network I needed to go through a few steps.

1. Conect keyboard and Monitor to Pi
2. Connect ethernet to Pi
3. Perform an update
4. Perform an upgrade
5. Edit the interfaces file
6. Reboot the system

The first two steps are fairly trivial - just follow the user guide.

Step 3
This is achieved by
sudo apt-get update
This takes a while, but is handled by the Pi well.

Step 4
sudo apt-get update
again the Pi takes its time here, but there is little to do except say yes once.

Step 5

Having read all manner of items about fiddling about with wpa supplicants I figured out the simplest solution was to edit the interfaces file

sudo nano /etc/networks/interfaces


and use the following information directly in that file;

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid “NETWORK SSID”
wpa-psk “NETWORK PASSWORD”



This worked.

Day 1

I have spent the day tinkering, and must admit that although I have not achieved much, I have enjoyed myself throughly.   The knowledge that my Pi is on my network has actually been a challenge.  I hope it still works tommorrow.