20 Tips How to set up a Raspberry Pi 4 as home server

When you unbox the pi – and that’s tip number one  – be extremely delicate and only touch the metal  parts. Don’t touch the printed circuit board.  Electric discharges might destroy the pi if  you do so. And if you take it out there is this  little notice telling you exactly that – but a  second too late probably because you have already  taken it out of the box, right ? 

Here’s the  case which I bought – and that actually takes me  to tip number 2 : Do buy or make a case before  you unbox the pi. You don’t want to ask yourself  the question where to put it once you unboxed it.  That question should really be answered before.  The case which I have bought from Geek worm is  made of aluminum and that’s my personal tip number  3 – buy a metal case. Better heat dissipation and  less risk of static electric discharges. 

The case  which I have bought has a couple of nice features  such as a lot of openings at the right places.  That brings me to tip number 4 – decide whether  you want to add possible extensions such as  display or camera and buy a case with the  corresponding openings. You don’t want to find  yourself in a situation where you would have to  buy a second case or drill holes into it etc. 

We  had just spoken about heat dissipation and yes,  parts of the Pi can become hot and heat  needs to be taken care of – that case  has these posts here which fit nicely  onto the parts which can become hot. My personal tip number 5 – go fanless. A fan will  constantly generate noise and might break or fail.  

Prefer metal, that won’t fail. Never. The  Geek worm case comes with those heat contact pads.  It’s a bit of fiddling to put them on the posts  of the case but ultimately I like that solution  because it makes sure that there is a good and  smooth contact between the case and the circuits. Another thing that I like with this case is the  fact that it is fixed with screws. Might just be  me but I really prefer screws over any snap  in mechanism. Generally speaking tip number  6 – make sure that the case can be opened at any  time in case you want to add or remove stuff.  

There’s two more tips here – Tip # 7 - buy  or find a charger or USB C adapter. The new  pi needs a USB C charger end hence your  old mini or micro USB chargers won’t do. Tip #8 – if you want to connect it to a screen,  then plan for those micro HDMI cables because  the HDMI connectors have changed as well. 

Last tip  on the hardware #9 – when you operate the Pi make  sure that you don’t turn it upside down because  that way the heat would stay under the printed circuit board and could not dissipate. So make  sure you note upside and downside of the case. Great, so as we could see there are  a couple of things to keep in mind  if you are buying a Raspberry Pi 4 – plan for some  additional expenses such as case and power supply.  

The price point of the Pi 4 is quite high so you  don‘t want to break it with an electric discharge  the day you unbox it. Next, let‘s have a look  at how we can image the Pi and breathe life into  it. We will use the new Raspberry Pi imager. I am  doing this under Linux but the tool is available  for Windows and Marcos as well. You do however need  a little micro SD card and a reader for it. Either  with an SD adapter if your laptop has an SD card  reader slot or use one of these USB readers here. The raspberry pi foundation has issued a  software called the Raspberry pi imager.  

That software can be downloaded from their website  and will effectively make previous solutions  such as etcher or dd redundant. Browse to their  website and download the tool for your operating  system. It’s available for Marcos, Windows and  Linux. Once you launch it you may choose which  Operating system to install. My advice is to use  the raspberry pi OS which is debian Linux in fact.  

That’s the most flexible one. It lets you  chose an SD card to write on and once you  click on write then you need to confirm that the  card can be overwritten and once I click on yes  then the imaging process starts. Under Linux and  presumably the same under Windows – the Operating  system will ask you if it is OK to access a disk  drive directly. 

That’s OK of course, we don’t have  a choice really. The imaging process depends on  the speed of your SD card reader, the USB and the  card itself. I’ve accelerated this in the video  . It took actually 5 minutes in reality. Great,  the card is imaged and before we put it into the  pi we need to activate ssh access. By default  this is disabled for security reasons. In order to  activate it, we just need to create a file in the  boot partition of the SSD card. The file content  doesn’t matter, just the file needs to be there. 

I  am doing this in the shell, but under Windows you  could do this with Explorer for example. Perfect,  I can now remove the SD card, put it into the  Pi and connect the Pi to power and the network.  I connect to it using ssh. The default user is  called pi and the default password is raspberry,  all in minor letters. The first thing we need to  do after the first login is really to change the  password – guys, this is important. We don’t want  millions of devices on this planet with the same  user and password. That opens so many doors for  the bad guys. Please do change the pi password.

In fact - if I had had an hdmi  cable when I set up the pi  then I could have done this easily using  mouse and keyboard because the locale and  the password change are the first two questions  that pop up when you first launch the pi desktop I think that was a great move of the vendor  to unify the way you image the pi – there used  to be so many different tools for Linux,  Windows and Mac and it required a lot of  research to find the right one. 

The Pi Imager  is definitely a much easier way to go. Great,  so now we have imaged the SD card. We can connect  to the pi using SSH and start using it. However,  there is another thing to keep in mind – if you  plan to use the Pi for „real“ computing tasks  such as home automation etc. then it will  behave like a „real“ server, that means it  will want to read and write to the hard disk.  Or – in the case of the Pi – to the SD card.  

But SD cards have never been intended to be  used for a large number of reads and writes.  They wear out – that means that they become  faulty once you do a certain number of I/Os  on them. No issue if you turn the Pi on for a  couple of hours every now and then or if you  are not running any applications on it. But as  soon as you want to install let‘s say a database  or home automation software on it then this will  become an issue. The card will break maybe after  a week or should be next a month or two. There is a  solution however – and that is using a Hard disk in  a USB case – preferably an SSD and boot from the  disk rather than from the SD card. Here is how:

I am logged into the pi with ssh and the first  thing that I do is update the repositories by  typing apt update. Next I want to upgrade  all software components. In order to do this  I type apt full-upgrade. I had already done this  before so in my case there is nothing more to  update. The next step is to launch the firmware  updater by issuing the rpi-update command as root.  

Now – be aware that this will bump  you to the latest Linux tree but I  haven’t seen any real issues with this. So  I confirm the question by typing y for yes.  The download starts and depending on your  bandwidth will take a couple of minutes or so.  Nice the upgrade is finished, you will need to  reboot the pi. So I type sudo reboot in order  to do this. A minute later it comes back and I can  reconnect. Note the updated kernel version number.  

Next we need to upgrade the eeprom, so the  firmware of the pi. This is done with the  rpi-eeprom-update program. Quickly checking the  possible options. We want the a option to install  the latest boot loader and also the d option  in order to use the default boot loader config.  So let’s quickly hack that in -as you can see  in my case the boot loader is already up to date.  

At the time of making this video the most  recent one was as of September 2020. If you  had had any changes here then you would need  to reboot at this point. Let’s just launch  raspi-config quickly and check that  the USB boot options are enabled.  Under advanced, find the option Boot loader Version  and make sure that it’s set to E1- use the latest  boot ROM software. Next find the Boot order  option and check that it’s set to USB boot.

Great – the next step is to connect an SSD or  hard drive to the USB port and actually copy the  SD card image over to the SSD drive. The tool is  called pic lone. If you are connected to a display  and a keyboard then you can select the SD card  image clone utility from the desktop. That’s the  easy way.

There is a hard way as well if you don’t  have a display and if you can only access the Pi over the network. When I recorded this video I did  not yet have an HDMI cable so I needed to find a  way to launch this graphical tool over ssh. That’s  not trivial because pic lone needs to run as root  but over ssh it needs to use my unprivileged X11  connection. But first let’s test X11 forwarding.  

I just need any X11 app and therefore I install  the x11-apps package. Just to show you how this  is meant to work – here we have clock, a  graphical clock or how about oxeyes, the two  eyes which follow my mouse cursor – so X11 over  ssh is working. Now this would not necessarily  work if I launched things as root or with sudo  because X11 could not connect to my display.  Therefore I need to copy the .Authority  file with the MIT magic cookie over to the  root user’s directory. Faith list shows me the  cookie and I can add it as root using faith add.  And – today – I can now launch x applications  as root – which you only should do if  you really need to. 

Now if I just launched  the pic lone utility with sudo it would not  see the disk devices so I actually need to use  dbus-launch. Again, if you are in front of the  pi and have it connected to a keyboard and screen  that would be much easier. Thought I’d show it in  case you ever need to run a graphical application  over ssh as root. Once pic lone recognizes both the  sd card and the SSD drive then I can start  the cloning process. Pic lone will copy the  partitions and their content and also resize  the partitions to the maximum possible extend.  You can see this here – the SD card is  32 GB in size, the SSD is 64 GB in size.  Note that both drives have the same identifier so  we should never have both in the pi at the same  time at boot time really. 

Rather than using  the reboot command I just shut down the Pi  because I now need to remove the SD card –  it won’t be used any more. In the future,  I will only boot from the SSD drive. Let me ssh  back in and launch the raspi-config tool once more  because there are two more things  which I want to fix quickly.  

Even though I have no screen attached to the Pi  I want to set a default resolution because some  applications read out that setting and won’t work  properly if it is not set. Last but not least I  want to get rid of these locale setting warnings  – so I just give the system a default locale.  I’ll generate the UTF8 locales for German  and English and chose a default locale. That  should avoid the warnings in the future.  That’s it for the housekeeping. All good.

Awesome, now our Pi boots from the SSD and we can  go ahead and install software on it. In one of the  next episodes we will have a look into Graham  Garner’s and Andreas Spies ‘ IOTStack project  which delivers a complete stack of home automation  software and Dockers. We will also install Webmin  on it so that you can do all the system related  tasks from a Graphical Web interface rather than  from the command line. 

Before we wrap up let‘s  quickly summarize and have a look at the expenses. We have the Pi that costs roughly 65 $ plus the  power supply for 10 $ plus the case for 10 $ and  you also need an SD Card and potentially a reader  for 15 $ . If you want to use it as a server then  plan for an SSD plus a USB case. Again at least  50$. so the whole thing sums up to as much as 150  $. Please just keep this in mind when you are  planning on buying and using a raspberry Pi.  

Some of the Kits that are sold in the  internet contain a lot of accessories  which you might never use. But the case and  the charger are – in my opinion – a must. Cool, guys – that concludes today‘s episode I hope it was useful for you and I hope  you liked it.