Setting up a Le Potato as a Headless Server

Homelabk3s

Due to the Raspberry Pi shortage, I picked up a Le Potato from Libre Computer. My intent is to use this for my k3s cluster.

Setting up the SD card

Go to the Downloads page for the AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato): link
For headless I picked the Raspbian lite image: 2022-09-22-raspbian-bullseye-arm64-lite+aml-s905x-cc.img.xz
Use the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash the microSD card
Set the Operating System to the image you downloaded above
Set the storage to your SD card
Click "Write"

rpi-image

Enabling SSH and user

To enable SSH, create a blank file called ssh:

# Change directory to the mounted SD card, mine is called "boot"
cd /Volumes/boot
touch ssh

To create a default user, create a file userconf.txt and

cd /Volumes/boot
touch userconf.txt

Then add one line containing the user details of the form username:encrypted-password.

To get the encrypted password, you need to run the following on (I've found that I could only get the command to work on another Raspberry Pi): openssl passwd -6.

For example:

echo 'mypassword' | openssl passwd -6 -stdin
# returns: $6$Y6OGrzgg/aeEMTZc$bmopwLo9vbb1.GOaXOGwdNC0cR3tT8XpvT.yB96j9JgUkqZ5OJE5F.jiC6Ud1ZQtL3kp.wu4gJE/UxdwDKagT0

So, to create a user pi with the password mypassword, the contents of userconf.txt would be:

pi:$6$Y6OGrzgg/aeEMTZc$bmopwLo9vbb1.GOaXOGwdNC0cR3tT8XpvT.yB96j9JgUkqZ5OJE5F.jiC6Ud1ZQtL3kp.wu4gJE/UxdwDKagT0

Now, eject the card and insert it into the board.

Logging in

To find the correct IP address, I logged into my router and looked for the raspberrypi in the settings. This was pretty easy as I only had a couple IPs associated with wired hosts.

ssh [email protected]
# Then enter the password you set above

Changing the hostname

sudo raspi-config

This will bring up a GUI of options

Select 1 System Options
Select S4 Hostname
Set your desired hostname
Select "Finish"
Select the option to reboot your board

hostname options 1

Now you can ssh as pi@<hostname>.local.

Enabling ssh keys

Instead of logging in using a password, you can use an ssh key. If you haven't created an ssh key, follow these instructions.

Now, use ssh-copy-id to copy it to the server:

ssh-copy-id pi@<hostname>.local
# This copies ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub by default, you can use the -i option if you have a different key location