Raspberry Pi Headless

A quick run through of setting up a Raspberry Pi when you can’t connect a keyboard or monitor.

All the tasks were done using a Mac, so you may need to adjust some pieces if you’re using Windows or Linux (*).

Install

Download the image and write it to the SD card. For this, I used the RasPI OS Buster Lite image which just gives the base OS without any of the GUI components. You can download from https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/, either using the Imager, or with the separate image file (though you’ll then need to use your own tool to write the card).

Once the image has been written, remove and reinsert the SD card to force a remount (*).

The SD card should mount as ‘boot’. On the card you need to write 2 files…

• An empty file named “ssh”
• A file named “wpa_supplicant.conf” containing the WiFI details:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=<Insert your 2 letter country code here, e.g. GB for the UK>
network={
 ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
 psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
}

Eject the SD card, pop it in the PI and boot!

Configure

SSH to the PI with username “pi” and password “raspberry”

Set the root password to something

sudo passwd root

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the following line

#PermitRootLogin prohibit-password

to

PermitRootLogin yes

Restart SSHD

sudo systemctl restart sshd

Log out, and ssh back in as root with the password you set

For all commands below replace “newname” with your chosen userid

Change the default “pi” user to a username of your choice, and rename the home directory

usermod -l newname pi
usermod -m -d /home/newname newname

If you want to keep the ability to run sudo as your new account without needing to provide a password, edit the file /etc/sudoers.d/010_pi-nopasswd and change the line

pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

to

newname ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Log out, and ssh back in as your new username with password “raspberry”

Test that you can still run commands with sudo

sudo echo "Hello"

You should see “Hello” echoed back to you

Finish

To “relock” the root account from logins

sudo passwd -l root

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the following line

PermitRootLogin yes

back to

#PermitRootLogin prohibit-password

Run an update

sudo apt update

and an upgrade

sudo apt dist-upgrade

And reboot

sudo reboot

Posted 25 March 2021

In Linux RaspberryPi TechNotes

Content borrowed from
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/headless.md
https://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/how-to-change-the-default-account-username-and-password