RPI4 USB Boot

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Technical requirements

• Laptop or PC with internet connection

• RPI4

• RPI compliant USB-C Power Supply

• USB-3 Memory Stick or USB-3 SSD with USB-A Connetor.

• USB-Keyboard

• Ethernet Network Cable (conntected to a switch or router)

• WIFI Password

• Monitor or TV with HDMI connector

• HDMI Cable with std. HDMI <-> Micro HDMI

• SSH public key is configured for your user on github.com.

Steps

1. Prepare the RPI Imager with Other General Purpose OS for UBUNTU XX.XX Server (64 bit) and change the image settings according to your network and user requirements. For details see section Image Settings.

2. flash the USB stick. You may have to confirm to override the data on the drive with your password.

   After flashing DO NOT remove the drive from your computer.

3. Open the system-boot partition on your computer.
4. Locate the file network-config
5. Open the file using your favorite text/code editor and change it as described in section Networking
6. Locate the file user-data
7. Open the file using your favorite text/code editor and change it as described in section System
8. Eject the drive
9. plug the drive into the RPI. Ensure that you use the blue USB-3 sockets.
10. power on the RPI and wait until cloud-init completes (a login prompt may appear prior to that)

Image Settings

Tab Common:

• Set the hostname to something identifyable. E.g. adlsdlp-acronym. This is the internal name of the raspbery.
• Set the default user and password. Ensure that you remember the password
• Setup the Wifi to the local configuration using the SSID (Wifi name) and its password.
• Choose the Wifi Country accordingly.
• Set the keyboard layout to the layout of your keyboard, which makes your life easier later in the process.

Tab Services:

• Activate SSH, so you can connect later via your network.
• Leave the Option use password for authentication (we change this later)

Tab Options:

• Leave everything as is.

Networking

The network configuration lack ethernet support by default. This should be included. The network-config should look as follows.

version: 2
renderer: networkd

ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: true
    optional: true
wifis:
  wlan0:
    dhcp4: true
    optional: true
    access-points:
      "mywifi":
        password: "c2fee4d164815217dd158e086014d3a048da7ba890a42d3b1dac1bcafa1ddd08"

System

The user-config replicates most of the settings done in the raspberry-pi Imager. The file is in YAML format, so the indentation is significant.

Below the apt section add the following lines:

package_update: true
package_upgrade: true
package_reboot_if_required: true

Add to the packages section the following lines:

packages:
  - avahi-daemon
  - jq
  - yq
  - apt-transport-https
  - ca-certificates
  - gnupg-agent

User settings:

Add the field ssh_import_id to the user configuration and include your github user as follows.

ssh_import_id: 
- gh:loginname

You need to replace loginname with your GitHub username.

You MAY add the line sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL to your user account. This is only recommended for testing and experimenting. For production systems the line should be sudo: ALL=(ALL). This variation will ask for the configured password before granting root privileges.

You may add additional users, if needed.

If the network connection is known to work, you may set ssh_pwauth to false.

Additional commands can be set in the runcmd section.

[DRSenn]

For Windows users:

If you generated your SSH key on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) or Ubuntu on Windows, you'll need to use the same environment to connect to your Raspberry Pi. This means using the WSL terminal or Ubuntu terminal for the SSH connection.

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Some Windows systems come with SSH for Windows preinstalled. In this case, WSL is not needed.