Setting up the CI20 for the cluster

This post talks about the steps I have followed to set up my Creator CI20 for the Raspberry Pi Cluster.

Burning Debian to the onboard NAND and configuring it

To run the CI20 on the Raspberry Pi Cluster I am going to write Debian 8 to the NAND storage. First the image must be downloaded, this can be found on ELinux. Once the image has downloaded it will need to be burned to a SD card.

This follows the same steps as burning a Raspbian Image for a Raspberry Pi detailed on my previous blog post. Additional details for the Creator CI20 have been noted in the CI20 Dev zone on ELinux.

Once the image has been burned we need to copy this to the NAND storage of the Creator board. Once the Creator CI20 has been turned off, set the boot_sel jumper to 2,3 Boot SD. This will tell it to boot the SD card.

Once you have inserted the SD card turn on the Creator and the red light will switch on. The light will change to blue while the NAND storage is being written to, and change back to red once finished.

When this is done you just need to turn off the Creator, swap the boot_sel switch back to Boot NAND and turn it back on. Debian will then boot as normal and you will be able to use the Creator.

Once Debian has been installed

Once Debian has been installed it will have been set up with the default username (ci20) and password (ci20).

You will want to SSH into the creator CI20 (or plug it into a screen and open a terminal) and change the password to start with.

This can be done with the ci20 user with the command passwd. The next thing you will want to do is update the installed packages. This should ensure that the Creator is up to date. This can be performed with the following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Running apt-get update will update the package list. This will then allow running apt-get upgrade to install new packages.

Installing packages and setting up user accounts

Now I have the Creator updated and ready to run headless I will install a couple more programs.

Personally, to run a headless Debian install I always install at least the below programs using the command:

sudo apt-get install vim htop byobu screen

• vim is my preferred command line editor. It appears its not installed by default so it must be installed first!
• htop is a more graphical version of the standard linux tool top. Its colour more than wins me over from standard top
• byobu is a very useful addition on top of screen or tmux. It customises how screen/tmux works and adds some useful information along the top/bottom
• screen is my chosen terminal multiplexer that I use with byobu.

Once these programs have been installed I create a new user to run my scripts. This can be done by following my previous Raspberry Pi (works the same for the Creator)  “how to create a user” guide.

Finally I set up my SSH keys by copying the SSH keys from my bunker-master Raspberry Pi to the newly configured Creator CI20.

mkdir .ssh
scp bunker-master:~/.ssh/* .

This I will use to log in via my private key and removes the need to enter my password every time.

Now the Creator is ready to join the cluster.