Working and Now On To Cross Compiling

Ok, looks like I now have the Raspberry Pi up and running. I currently have had the RPi running for over two days now and everything seems to be running smoothly. As you can see in the following picture, I have it running, with the USB connections going through a powered hub. In addition, I have the ethernet plugged in and a second USB to ethernet connector plugged into the same powered usb hub. The display shows a couple of xterminal windows and the backdrop of the RPi logo. I haven't really explored all of the ins and outs yet.

I have added a VNC server so that I can pull up the screen from anywhere, including outside the house through a vpn connection. Technology is great, you get to experiment and do things when you want to do them.

I have the current SD load on a 16GB card. I felt that I needed to have something a bit bigger in case that I get really inventive and want to load a whole bunch of crap on the card. Right now the big focus is to be able to cross compile the operating system to where I want it to be. The steps are as follows:

1. install an Ubuntu VM running on Fusion under my Mac Mini
2. install the cross compiler and associated tools onto the Ubuntu VM
3. get the linux source for the operating system from the Raspberry Pi git repository
4. compile the thing
5. move the compiled load onto the Mac Mini
6. transfer the compiled load onto a new 16GB SD card

That is what I plan on doing over the next couple of days. Wish me luck.

-- LW

RPi - Working and Now Onto Cross Compiling

Ok, looks like I now have the Raspberry Pi up and running.  I currently have had the RPi running for over two days now and everything seems to be running smoothly.  As you can see in the following picture, I have it running, with the USB connections going through a powered hub.  In addition, I have the ethernet plugged in and a second USB to ethernet connector plugged into the same powered usb hub.  The display shows a couple of xterminal windows and the backdrop of the RPi logo.  I haven't really explored all of the ins and outs yet.

I have added a VNC server so that I can pull up the screen from anywhere, including outside the house through a vpn connection.  Technology is great, you get to experiment and do things when you want to do them.

I have the current SD load on a 16GB card.  I felt that I needed to have something a bit bigger in case that I get really inventive and want to load a whole bunch of crap on the card.  Right now the big focus is to be able to cross compile the operating system to where I want it to be.  The steps are as follows:

1. install an Ubuntu VM running on Fusion under my Mac Mini
2. install the cross compiler and associated tools onto the Ubuntu VM
3. get the linux source for the operating system from the Raspberry Pi git repository
4. compile the thing
5. move the compiled load onto the Mac Mini
6. transfer the compiled load onto a new 16GB SD card

That is what I plan on doing over the next couple of days.  Wish me luck.

-- LW

RPi - First Things First

I was able to get the Raspberry Pi (RPi) to boot after installing a load of Wheazy-Raspbian onto an SD card. This is a partial tale of "what the heck happened?"

Step 1 - get a copy of the RPi load off of http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.
I decided to get the one marked 2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img.zip. When I downloaded the file, Mountain Lion was quick to automatically unpack it for me.

Step 2 - put the RPi load onto an SD Card.
For a Mac this is not really an involved step but if you are not used to working on the command line it might be daunting. You first launch the terminal then put in your SD card reader followed by placing the SD card into the reader. Assuming that the SD card is formatted correctly, a "df -h" will show a list of the drives on the system. My SD card was labeled "/dev/disk3s1". That means that for purposes of this procedure I use "/dev/rdisk3" to refer to the entire SD card. The procedure can be found at http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup. So to install the image, I ran the following:
sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1
sudo dd bs=1m if=2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk3
diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

Step 3 - put the SD card into the RPi, connect all cables, and apply power
I removed the SD card from the SD reader and put it into the RPi, I then connected the ethernet cable, and applied power to the system. Note that at first I did not have a monitor or keyboard/mouse connected. I first wanted to access it via a headless means since I do most of my work remotely

Worked just fine.

-- LW

RPi - First Things First

I was able to get the Raspberry Pi (RPi) to boot after installing a load of Wheazy-Raspbian onto an SD card.  This is a partial tale of "what the heck happened?"

Step 1 - get a copy of the RPi load off of http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads.
I decided to get the one marked 2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img.zip.  When I downloaded the file, Mountain Lion was quick to automatically unpack it for me.

Step 2 - put the RPi load onto an SD Card.
For a Mac this is not really an involved step but if you are not used to working on the command line it might be daunting.  You first launch the terminal then put in your SD card reader followed by placing the SD card into the reader.  Assuming that the SD card is formatted correctly, a "df -h" will show a list of the drives on the system.  My SD card was labeled "/dev/disk3s1".  That means that for purposes of this procedure I use "/dev/rdisk3" to refer to the entire SD card.  The procedure can be found at http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup.  So to install the image, I ran the following:
sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1
sudo dd bs=1m if=2012-10-28-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk3
diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

Step 3 - put the SD card into the RPi, connect all cables, and apply power
I removed the SD card from the SD reader and put it into the RPi, I then connected the ethernet cable, and applied power to the system.  Note that at first I did not have a monitor or keyboard/mouse connected.  I first wanted to access it via a headless means since I do most of my work remotely

Worked just fine.

-- LW

Raspberry Pi Came In

I ordered a Raspberry Pi on July 27th of this year and it came in the mail on Dec 10th (4 months and 14 days; or 137 days). That is a long lead time to wait for an item. However, looking at all the postings from locations around the world I can see why it is so popular.

What am I planning on doing with it? Experimenting of course! People have used this thing for all kinds of projects from streaming video to making a wireless access port to controlling motors on a robot. I like networking and media streaming so I will probably be using it there.

-- LW

Raspberry Pi Came In

I ordered a Raspberry Pi on July 27th of this year and it came in the mail on Dec 10th (4 months and 14 days; or 137 days).  That is a long lead time to wait for an item.  However, looking at all the postings from locations around the world I can see why it is so popular.

What am I planning on doing with it?  Experimenting of course!  People have used this thing for all kinds of projects from streaming video to making a wireless access port to controlling motors on a robot.  I like networking and media streaming so I will probably be using it there.

-- LW

Startup Notes

Well, I have three Raspberry Pis right now.  I have decided that I need to have a separate place to post information about what I am doing with them.  More information soon.

Strange Port Openings Appeared

While I was going through the motions of trying to get the Ceton echo (CE) to authenticate against my WMC pc, I encountered so many problems that I started turning off all my controls.  In particular, I turned on uPnP on my router and took down my Windows firewall on the WMC pc.  After I that I was successful in getting the CE to authenticate.

This morning I was fiddling with the router and I remembered that I still had uPnP running.  When I went to turn it off, I noticed that the Teredo tunneling protocol had been activated from both the WMC pc and the CE ip addresses.  (I looked it up)  The Teredo tunneling protocol is a way of tunneling through a router that has IPv6 turned off, which is the case on my router.  I turned off IPv6 because of all the things that I had read concerning bypassing routers.  Symantec has a nice writeup on how this protocol can be used by botnets, viruses, etc. to wreak havoc on a network.  Needless to say, I eliminated the Teredo ports and turned off uPnP altogether.

I am assuming that the CE will still work with the WMC PC because Microsoft should have already given out certs for the connection.  There should no longer be a need to pass back any information.  I will test it out tonight but the theory is that this setup should work without having uPnP or those ports available.  Otherwise, I am really concerned that I have an opening to the outside that I did not authorize.

BTW, what are people who aren't tech knowledgeable supposed to do?

-- LW

Got New Ceton Echo WMC Extender

I received a Ceton Echo Windows Media Center Extender (http://cetoncorp.com/products/echo/) which was delivered yesterday.  The full up versions of these things only came out on 30 Nov (which was last week).  First appearances were that this would be fine for eliminating the Verizon STB in the basement.  Small form factor and very quiet.  However, I was completely unable to setup the CE with my current WMC Atom based processor.  The error that I was getting back indicated that something was out of whack with my firewall setup.  So I had to abandon my efforts last night until I had enough time to do more research.

I happened upon the CE installation guide online (different than what was on the quick start guide included with the CE) at http://cetoncorp.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/54/26/echo---installation-guide.  What this is telling me is that there are a whole bunch of ports that need to be available on the main WMC pc for the CE to work properly.  What I am having a little trouble with is the two ports that are open to the internet for download and upload.  I will need to do a little more research into this.

Update: Well after about five or six tries I was finally able to get the Ceton echo to connect to the Windows media center. What I experienced from that point, was that it was pretty much like having the windows media center right there in front of me. I was able to take a video and was able to switch and move between various things as well as start a recording, but I have the recording going while I have the CE off. Time will tell how well this is going to work in my setup.

-- LW

First Vlan Tryout Setup

After having borked the router last time when I was trying to set up a vlan, I am now going to be a little more cautious. To that end, I am going to list out all of the steps and the proper sequence so that I don't get into trouble. My first tryout is to set up a vlan from a VMware Stack through two managed switches, and then to the final router. The following steps will be necessary:

1. Setup the Stack to connect through vlan8.
2. Setup the Mac Mini to put vlan8 out as a tagged stream.
3. Setup the Mac Mini to be able to get to any system in vlan8, but not the other way around (iptables equiv.).
4. Setup the first switch to accept vlan8 packets on the same port as the Mac Mini.
5. Setup the first switch to pass the tagged vlan8 to the second switch on a trunk.
6. Setup the second switch to receive the tagged vlan8 packet on the trunk and pass it as a tagged packet to the port on which the router resides.
7. Setup the router to receive the tagged vlan8 packet on the trunk line and pass it on through the NAT firewall to the outside.
8. The router should be set up so that it does not allow cross communication between vlan8 and any other vlan on the router.
9. Setup the router with a port forward to the VMware stack.

That is basically what I need to accomplish, now on to figuring out the particulars of each.

Update: 12/3/2012 - I have performed steps 4, 5, and 6 with the two switches.  That was the easy part of this sequence.  I have decided to make the subnets reflective of the vlan number by using the vlan number as one of the 4 octets.  Not sure whether to use C, B, or A addressing scheme.  I have also performed step 2 to have the vlan8 output as a tagged stream.  When I went to perform step 1 I set the Stack to the vlan that I had created in step 2, I encountered no problems.  When I changed the DHCP address to the new vlan8 subnet that is when the problems began.  More later.


- LW