Baking Pi – Part 1

After starting with a Raspberry Pi that was just too simple to set up as XMBC media centre for daughter #1 bedroom, it soon became a permanent feature there – meaning, of course, that I needed another…

I now have my second helping of Pi – again I got a Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB RAM).

I’m running this mostly headless and wanted to post a few pointers on my setup (so I can recall it when I trash the Raspbian OS and have to restart from scratch.

After a standard Raspbian install I am doing the following actions / configurations :

• Basic configuration via raspi-config
• Setting a static IP address
• Updating all packages
• Adding a custom port to listen for SSH on (for remote access through home router)
• Setting up vsftpd

Here is the step by step guide:

Basic configuration via raspi-config

• Make an SSH connection to the device and login (pi / raspberry)
• From the command line run sudo raspi-config
• Upgrade raspi-config
• Configure as required.

Setting up a static IP address

• From the command line run sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
• Change iface eth0 inet dhcp to iface eth0 inet static
• below this add…
• address 192.168.97.12
• netmask 255.255.255.0
• gateway 192.168.97.1
• Now reboot (sudo reboot)

Updating all packages

• From the command line run sudo apt-get update
• From the command line run sudo apt-get upgrade
• Now reboot (sudo reboot)

Adding a customer port to listen for SSH on

• From the command line run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• Add a line under where it says Port 22
• Type Port xxxx on the new line (where xxxx is your desired additional port number)

Setting up vsftpd (FTP Server)

• From the command line run sudo apt-get install vsftpd
• Now edit the config file to change the port is listens on
• From the command line run sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf
• Under the line that reads listen=YES add the following lines
• listen_port=xxxx (where xxxx is your desired port)
• pasv_enable=YES
• pasv_min_port=yyyyy (where yyyyy is the lower range of ports you want it to use)
• pasv_max_port=zzzzz (where zzzzz is the upper range of ports you want it to use)
• Now restart the vsftpd service with sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

All done. The Pi is now configured to allow SSH and FTP access on custom ports (with corresponding holes through the firewall to allow external access). Enjoy…