Raspberri Pi Headless SSH

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MadEngineer

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# 249515 14-May-2019 19:03

Hi, all the headless guides say to create a file simply name ssh along with a wpa_supplicant.conf file that contains your wireless details.

I've done the above and the RBP connects to my wireless and gets an IP, is pingable but SSH connection attempts fail with connection refused.

When googling this issue the answer is to place the ssh file into a 'boot' partition, however the setup of the SD card states to simply format it with the official tool then copy over the files. There's no other special partition. Also this contradicts the instructions of placing the ssh file and the wpa_supplicant.conf file into the same place - the latter clearly working as it's connecting to my wifi.

What have I done wrong?

neb

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# 2236834 14-May-2019 19:25

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You need to create an empty file called "ssh" in the root of the SD card, this turns on SSH and deletes itself on first boot. Since that's on a DOS partition, you can do it from anything and don't need to be able to mount an ext3 or whatever filesystem.

As for WiFi on a Pi... ugh, you're going to have neverending hassles with that, and every time it goes offline you'll have to go out to wherever it is and unplug and rewire and reset and re-plug everything. I use a WiFi bridge for my IoT stuff, so they all talk ethernet and the bridge handles the WiFi stuff.

richms

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# 2236836 14-May-2019 19:35

Ive found the 2 new ones with good wifi are faultless on wifi. That previous 2.4GHz only chipset was a dog with disconnections and terrible performance. I kept using a USB stick on those pi's.

First time I had issues getting SSH to work and ended up having to plug a screen in and use raspi-config. I think the making a ssh file is a cruel joke because I booted, waited ages and powered off and put it back in the computer and the file was still there. Gave it at least 5 mins.

Richard rich.ms

MadEngineer

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# 2236841 14-May-2019 19:45

neb: You need to create an empty file called "ssh" in the root of the SD card, this turns on SSH and deletes itself on first boot. Since that's on a DOS partition, you can do it from anything and don't need to be able to mount an ext3 or whatever filesystem. .

that's ... exactly what I did. No go.

neb

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# 2236842 14-May-2019 19:46

richms:
Ive found the 2 new ones with good wifi are faultless on wifi. That previous 2.4GHz only chipset was a dog with disconnections and terrible performance. I kept using a USB stick on those pi's.

Ah, yeah, the new ones are better now. Or at least they couldn't be any worse, the old ones were dire and even worse were the very old ones where you needed custom kernel-version-specific drivers so each time the kernel got updated the WiFi would disable itself until you plugged it into a wired connection and updated the drivers. After that I just didn't trust Pi WiFi any more and went with wired, and haven't had any problems since then, apart from the usual issues where the Pi s**ts itself and needs to be rebooted or reflashed. Speaking of which, need to go out and reboot one of them now...

neb

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# 2236844 14-May-2019 19:48

MadEngineer:
neb: You need to create an empty file called "ssh" in the root of the SD card, this turns on SSH and deletes itself on first boot.
that's ... exactly what I did. No go.

Hmm, odd. Maybe they've done something even more "clever" in recent versions, the "touch /ssh" thing has always worked for me but I haven't had to do that for six months or so.

1yippy1

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# 2236845 14-May-2019 19:48

Are you using username "pi" and password "raspberry" ?

MadEngineer

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# 2236930 14-May-2019 20:09

Yes (tried ssh pi@device ) but connection refused means it's not even listening for ssh

Oblivian

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# 2236934 14-May-2019 20:13

Does the SSH file go buhbye on reboot as if it's tried to enable? (smaller partition = boot)

(it has to have no extension, which windows may be applying one and hidden?)

Take it no monitor out to at least do a

sudo systemctl enable ssh

sudo systemctl start ssh

timmmay

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# 2236936 14-May-2019 20:15

ssh isn't enabled by default on raspberrian. You have to run the configure command (sudo raspi-config) and enable it. Unless what you've said above does the same thing, but this way works.

MadEngineer

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# 2236937 14-May-2019 20:16

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Answer: Noobs doesn't support the ssh file. You need to use an image writer tool to apply the image file which provides a boot partition. In that partition you place said files.

Oblivian

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# 2236942 14-May-2019 20:30

Guess we all assumed you had the latest image vs a factory SD card :P

mentalinc

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# 2236964 14-May-2019 21:06

and for others, NOOBs is just to download and flash something like raspbian (which we all assumed was already being used).

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outdoorsnz

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# 2238238 15-May-2019 10:44

Maybe slightly off-topic, but have you tried PINNS? It has headless options - VNC and SSH.

https://github.com/procount/pinn/blob/master/README_PINN.md

But apparently headless SSH works. Sure no file extensions? I keen to know, as this is something I want too. Pain to hook in a screen to just run pi-config.

https://hackernoon.com/raspberry-pi-headless-install-462ccabd75d0