[Raspberry Pi General] Oswald Boelcke:
Initial Installation of the Raspberry Pi

Updated on 2019-03-17!

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Initial Installation of the Raspberry Pi

As already said I'd ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ including the official housing and AC charger. Most likely the whole setup is going to work with other Raspberry Pi models but please note that Jacob Salmela, the developer of Pi-hole, recommends a system of 512 MB RAM. Brief remark, you're unable to place the Raspberry Pi in its housing with an inserted microSD card.

Talking about microSD cards, I use a 32 GB, class 10 card to host the Raspberry Pi's OS and the Pi-hole/PiVPN. I'm convinced that a 16 GB card is also suitable, even a 8 GB one might be sufficient. I personally didn't require a keyboard or screen for the Raspberry Pi as I connect to it via a Secure Shell (SSH).

I decided to use RASPBIAN, the official OS of the Raspberry Pi Foundation; however, there're other OS' available, just search the web. I'm using Raspbian Stretch Lite, which fully meets my requirements, and downloaded it here as a zip-file. Unzipped the file and inserted the microSD into my notebook. There are multiple ways described to flash the OS image to the SD but I decided to use the way via Win32DiskImager. The Win32DiskImager utility is available via its Sourceforge Project page as an installer file. I just exactly followed the instructions as provided on the last linked Raspberry Pi page.

After the image had been flashed to the SD I had to create a simple file called "ssh" in the /boot partition in order to be later on able to access the Raspberry Pi via SSH. As a Windows user, first I'd to install Ext2Fsd driver to be able to access the system partition. The microSD was now prepared and ready to use.

The Raspberry Pi was already sleeping in its housing, I inserted the microSD into the Pi, connected the Pi by a regular network cable to LAN3 of my Fritz!Box (LAN1 is used for the connection to my Genexis Hybrid Live! Titanium-54 running in bridge mode as fiber modem, the internet radio is connected to LAN4) and finally connected the Pi to power.

For the following steps, please refer to the attached screenshots (I apologise for not havin changed Windows system language to English). Next step was to access the admin panel of our Fritz!Box. Its DHCP server is enabled; however, I don't allow the DHCP server to use the complete spectrum of IP addresses ("Home network => Home network overview => Network settings => IPv4-addresses"). On "Home network => Home network overview" I selected the details of the raspberrypi. Here, I assigned an IP to raspberrypi that is outside of the DHCP IP-range and ticked the always assign the same IP. Just for completeness, even before I installed the Raspberry Pi the DNS-servers were set to 85.214.20.141 (i.e. Digital Courage) and 213.73.91.35 (i.e. Chaos Computer Club) in the Fritz!Box ("Internet => Access credentials => DNS server"). On this German page you find other uncencored and free DNS server without tracking.

Knowing the IP-address of the Raspberry Pi, I now connected to the Pi via SSH by use of PuTTY that I downloaded from here and installed it. After start of PuTTY and entering of the Pi's IP, a terminal opens.

The default user credentials are:

- User: pi

- Password: raspberry

Now, I accessed the Pi's admin terminal, and first changed the default password by:

passwd

Changed slightly the Pi's configuration:

sudo raspi-config

Advanced Options → Expand Filesystem

Localisation Options → Change Timezone → Europe → Berlin
Finish, Reboot

My last step in the setup of the Raspberry Pi was to update the package by:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo reboot

Final remark: I keep the Raspberry Pi's WiFi disabled as I don't require it.