Joys of Astroberry

Personal extra packages

Installing the preferred extras, just to feel at home compared to other POSIX environments.

$ sudo apt install silversearcher-ag

Change defaults

Device name

The default name for the Astroberry device is astroberry. This can be accessed on a network using astroberry.local but this is neither secure nor helpful if you're in range of another device running Astroberry. As such use the following to change the default name.

$ sudo nano /etc/devicename

Change the device name, save and exit via ^O and ^X.

A reboot is needed to take effect.

$ sudo reboot

After the reboot the device will be accessible via <devicename>.local. Where <devicename> is the new device name.

Change User Login

The default user is astroberry. It would be nice to change this username but the name of astroberry is in a lot of configuration. Until a safe way of changing this is found it is not recommended to change this.

Passwords

By default astroberry comes with default passwords for the users pi and astroberry. Theses passwords need to be reset so the Pi is more secure.

$ sudo passwd pi
$ sudo passwd astroberry

VNC Password

The VNC password is not linked to the user password. As such the password of this needs to change separately. To change the password run:

$ sudo vncpasswd -service

Not that for clients, like noVnc that only the first 8 characters will be used.

GPSD

I have a USGlobalsat BU-353-S USB GPS dongle. This should have worked out of the box, however, it didn't. I needed to do some searching but the best result I have is from following the second answer Ask Ubuntu - How can I get the GPS receiver BU-353 working on Ubuntu?.

Basically you need to change the /etc/default/gpsd to:

• disable gpsd from starting at boot time. This could be because the USB hasn't loaded before the daemon has run
• use hot plugging for the USB device
• mention what USB device it should be, multiple USB devices will cause and issue. Will deal with that when it happens.
• provide some gpsd options.

My config file is:

# Default settings for the gpsd init script and the hotplug wrapper.

# Start the gpsd daemon automatically at boot time
START_DAEMON="false"

# Use USB hotplugging to add new USB devices automatically to the daemon
USBAUTO="true"

# Devices gpsd should collect to at boot time.
# They need to be read/writeable, either by user gpsd or the group dialout.
DEVICES="/dev/ttyUSB0"

# Other options you want to pass to gpsd
GPSD_OPTIONS="-n -G -b"

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi HotSpot

The default Wi-Fi HotSpot is astroberry and the password to that hotspot is astroberry. This again is not a secure setup. The following is done to change the hotspot SSID and password.

Change via command line

$ sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/HotSpot.nmconnection

Change at least the following fields: ssid, psk

The psk is the password and is in cleartext. This is a limitation of the Ubuntu's NetworkManager. What is needed is to make sure the default value is changed. Also changing the ssid needs to be changed as the way WiFi works is that multiple networks with the same name act as the same so change this!

To save and exit use ^O and ^X.

Change via GUI

TODO - write this up

Connect to Wi-Fi network

TODO - use GUI to set up

Sudo access

Default sudo access for the astroberry user is to put the password in. To make life easier the user can be put into the no password group for sudo

$ sudo nano /etc/sudoers.d/010_astroberry-nopasswd

And add the following line:

astroberry ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

SSH access

Raspberry Pi's enable ssh access but to allow for a passwordless ssh a known public ssh key is need to be provided to the user account.

$ mkdir ~/.ssh

Create an ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and add public keys that will have access to the Pi.

Change the file permissions to be what is needed for OpenSSH.

$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh
$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys