During last hackathon in Ganymede I created a working instance of monitoring system which included Nagios, Jira, Ganglia and hardware like Raspberry-PI and Arduino (those ARMs are used just for end-user purposes like dashboards and alert lights).

For now I’d like to make a quick write up of preparing Raspbian to work on R-PI. Those are easy things, but it’s good to have them in a note.

1. Installing Raspberry-PI from Linux box (firstly download Raspbian img from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads)
   • Format Your SD card in FAT32:
     
     Shell

     root@rpi2:~# mkdosfs -F 32 -v /dev/mmcblk0

     1	root@rpi2:~# mkdosfs -F 32 -v /dev/mmcblk0

   • Copy img file to SD using dd:
     
     root@rpi2:~# dd bs=1M if="2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img" of=/dev/mmcblk0

     1	root@rpi2:~# dd bs=1M if="2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img" of=/dev/mmcblk0

2. Overclocking (gives us a good boost needed for displaying complicated dashboards – You can read about overclocking here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/overclocking):
   • Mount SD card somewhere in the linux box and edit the config.txt file from this Raspbian boot-partition so it looks like:
     
     over_voltage=6 arm_freq=1000 core_freq=500 sdram_freq=500

     1 2 3 4

     over_voltage=6 arm_freq=1000 core_freq=500 sdram_freq=500

3.  VNC installation on display 0: (so You can VNC into the main display / desktop):
   • VNC installation:
     
     root@rpi2:~# apt-get install x11vnc root@rpi2:~# x11vnc -storepasswd /etc/x11vnc.pass

     1 2	root@rpi2:~# apt-get install x11vnc root@rpi2:~# x11vnc -storepasswd /etc/x11vnc.pass

   • Now the init script (save it as /etc/init.d/vnc):
     
     /usr/bin/x11vnc -xkb -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -noxrecord -noxfixes -noxdamage -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pass -forever -bg -rfbport 5900 -o /var/log/x11vnc.log

     1	/usr/bin/x11vnc -xkb -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -noxrecord -noxfixes -noxdamage -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pass -forever -bg -rfbport 5900 -o /var/log/x11vnc.log

   • And just make it start during the boot process:
     
     root@rpi2:~# chmod +x /etc/init.d/vnc root@rpi2:~# update-rc.d vnc defaults

     1 2	root@rpi2:~# chmod +x /etc/init.d/vnc root@rpi2:~# update-rc.d vnc defaults

4. Prevent screen from turning off:
   • Edit /etc/kbd/config so it contains following entries:
     
     BLANK_TIME=0 POWERDOWN_TIME=0

     1 2	BLANK_TIME=0 POWERDOWN_TIME=0

     
     and restart kbd: /etc/init.d/kbd restart
   • Edit vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf so it contains following entry in the section [SeatDefaults]:
     
     xserver-command=X -s 0 dpms

     1	xserver-command=X -s 0 dpms

That’s all for now. I’ll try to make a blog-post about that hackathon project as I’ve been receiving questions about it. It’s possible, that I’ll try to make a talk about it during the next OWASP meeting here at our Kraków / Poland chapter.