Setting up RPi

Yak Shaving

I'm documenting all the steps I had to take just in case I need to reproduce them later.

The point of all of this was to setup a MQTT broker on my local network rather than signing up for some cloud solution or using an (online broker)[http://test.mosquitto.org/].

So I decided to setup one on an old Raspberry Pi, that I had. This ended up turning into a Yak Shaving pain.

I'm not going to write about the actual Yak Shaving steps I had to take but rather just document all that I did.

Set keyboard to English US

I followed the steps dictated here to change my keyboard layout.

I had to do this because my default was set to English UK which made the # a £. So can't really comment a line out as I had to do in the next step.

Boot Raspberry Pi directly to command line interface

By default the RPi as it starts up prompts for a login. I wanted it to directly boot into the terminal as the pi user. I followed the instructions here and here.

Voila!! Now it boots directly as pi user

Setup static IP address

I did this because I didn't have a wifi adapter and my home router was far away from my office. Ideally, I could have just moved my monitor and keyboard and configured the internet directly but I also wanted to have a predictable IP in case I needed to shut down the RPi server.

I followed instructions here.

Now I have my RPi setup near my router and I can ssh into it from my home office.