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Notebook entry

Raspberry Pi headless setup

Lovell Felix 1 min read

Archive note: the tools and versions have moved on. I have kept this entry because the debugging path and the underlying constraint may still be useful.

The steps I go back to every time I image a new Raspberry Pi for the homelab cluster, all done before the first boot so there's never a monitor or keyboard involved, as a gist:

A few notes on what's in there. Dropping wpa_supplicant.conf onto the boot partition gets it picked up automatically on first boot, no manual Wi-Fi setup needed. The ssh file needs no content at all; its presence on the boot partition is what enables the SSH server. In config.txt, gpu_mem=16 hands almost everything back to the CPU, which is right for a headless node with no display output and wrong for anything doing camera or video work. The NFS setup is the same pattern as any other Linux box, just via Debian's package names instead of CentOS's.

Put together, this is everything needed to go from a freshly flashed SD card to a Pi that's on the network, reachable over SSH, and exporting storage, without ever plugging in a display. It's the same setup I use to bring up each node in the k3s cluster.

About the author

Lovell Felix

Infrastructure and reliability engineer working on Linux platforms, configuration delivery, and deployment safety at fleet scale.

@lovellfelix

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