Introduction
A couple of years ago I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 and have used it in several ways from a Pi-Hole to a full bitcoin node using a number of prebuilt OS packages. Anyhow today I thought I would tear it all down and start building a system suite from scratch again starting with a generic base. Taking the knowledge I have gained from the past few years. Here’s how I set up my Raspberry Pi 4 with a headless OS for my future projects.
What is a headless OS?
Headless OS refers to a operating system that does not have Graphical User Interface (GUI) functionality. Used for systems that you only want to interact with on the terminal with no intention of plugging in a monitor. This greatly reduces the size of the operating system while maintain all its core functionality.
Prerequisites
- A Raspberry Pi
Step 1: Burn that Pi
Now with the obvious prerequisite out the way let’s download the Raspberry pi imager and set up our SD card.
Once you have the Pi installer open your machine, slot in your SD card and select what pi you’re wanting to burn to along with the OS of choice. We are going to select Other OS > Raspberry Pi OS Light (64-bit)
Configure the installation like this and yes I am blocking out details shame on you!
You want to set the hostname your user and password. As well as configure your Wifi, If you want to access it that way.
The next step is to configure SSH. Generate a key if you don’t already have one and throw your public key in here.
Before you burn uncheck auto eject, reason for this is step 2. Now burn that OS you sexy beast!
Step 2: Enable SSH
With the headless version of Raspbin we need to manually enable SSH functionality. Luckily to do this is pretty easy. We need to go into the bootf of our newly burned SD card and create a file called SSH. Make sure there are no extentions to the file. and dont worry we dont need to write anything into it.
Step 3: Configure PowerShell
Now with the Raspberry Pi burned and SSH enabled, let’s configure our PowerShell so we can easily connect to the Raspberry Pi when we want to. I would step you through this but I used the following blog post to achieve this and man has outlined the process well. Following step 3 of the guide we add the terminal command by doing the following:
Open PowerShell, click the drop-down and open settings:
In the settings click on “open JSON file” where we will put our custom terminal startup commands:
Going down to the profiles portion of the settings file, we are going to add the following dictionary element to the list:
As you can see, we are executing the shh command when starting the terminal. This will spawn an ssh session with our Raspberry Pi using the public-private key pair we have set up.
Now when we click on the new terminal element. We find a beautiful shell spawned on our pi! CONGRATULATIONS!
Step 3: Lock that Pi down
Now that we have a shell on the Pi let’s lock it down so only users with our SSH Key can connect to the Pi. The alternative is we have a ‘rogue’ device on the network and we don’t want that!
Become root with the casual sudo -s and now let’s lock down our config.
Going into the SSH config with vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config
You want to ensure PasswordAuthentication no. I also set AllowedUsers to just me 😀
Now restart the service service ssh restart
If you’re getting stuck at this stage here are some links that I found of use
Conclusion
BOOM DIGIDY!!! We have successfully set up a Pi that only accepts SSH access from my specified user. Cool stuff right?
Now to do many wild and wonderful things with this little bad boy. Don’t worry I’ll keep you updated!
Now go touch some grass 😀