Yesterday, I set up a new Raspberry Pi for the first time in a long while. I have to question some of the choices the Pi foundation is doing with Raspbian. It's become somewhat of a pain in the ass to set up these days.
When you load a new instance of Raspbian (or Raspberry Pi OS as it's now known) on to a flash card, you don't get a SSH server, OR a default user. Supposedly, this is done in the name of security, but it makes it kind of a pain in the ass. Supposedly, you can use the foundation's tool to load the OS on to a card, and this will do most of the heavy lifting for you, but there are enough reports of it failing that it seems to be hit and miss.
If you want to do it the old way, the way I started back with an original Pi B (that's still running a torrent server and some other stuff,) you now have to create a file to tell the SSH server to start. Not so much a pain, but the new password thing is a real pain in the ass.
You don't get a default account to log in with anymore. If you don't keep up on all the patch notes, you won't know this - you have to create another file with the user you want to create AND an encrypted password that you have to generate on another system with OpenSSL, and not just any version of it, it has to be of a certain vintage or it won't even recognize the type of format you want to use, and will just tell you it's an unrecognized option. Fortunately, I had a newer version of Armbian running that had the proper version of OpenSSL and was able to run the commands and generate the file, but if you don't have that you're out of luck.
As I said, this was all done in the name of security, but contrast this to the default Armbian install. You log in with root/1234 and it IMMEDIATELY makes you change the password and create a user account. That seems to be a better thought out method than forcing you to use special tools that may not work or run arcane commands on other systems.
I guess, however, the Pi foundation isn't really as interested in the hobbyist market as they were, seeing as how they seem to be concentrating on the industrial market. I wonder if that's what drove the Armbian group to make a version of that OS for the Raspberry Pis?
Yesterday, I set up a new Raspberry Pi for the first time in a long while. I have to question some of the choices the Pi foundation is doing with Raspbian. It's become somewhat of a pain in the ass to set up these days.
When you load a new instance of Raspbian (or Raspberry Pi OS as it's now known) on to a flash card, you don't get a SSH server, OR a default user. Supposedly, this is done in the name of security, but it makes it kind of a pain in the ass. Supposedly, you can use the foundation's tool to load the OS on to a card, and this will do most of the heavy lifting for you, but there are enough reports of it failing that it seems to be hit and miss.
If you want to do it the old way, the way I started back with an original Pi B (that's still running a torrent server and some other stuff,) you now have to create a file to tell the SSH server to start. Not so much a pain, but the new password thing is a real pain in the ass.
You don't get a default account to log in with anymore. If you don't keep up on all the patch notes, you won't know this - you have to create another file with the user you want to create AND an encrypted password that you have to generate on another system with OpenSSL, and not just any version of it, it has to be of a certain vintage or it won't even recognize the type of format you want to use, and will just tell you it's an unrecognized option. Fortunately, I had a newer version of Armbian running that had the proper version of OpenSSL and was able to run the commands and generate the file, but if you don't have that you're out of luck.
As I said, this was all done in the name of security, but contrast this to the default Armbian install. You log in with root/1234 and it IMMEDIATELY makes you change the password and create a user account. That seems to be a better thought out method than forcing you to use special tools that may not work or run arcane commands on other systems.
I guess, however, the Pi foundation isn't really as interested in the hobbyist market as they were, seeing as how they seem to be concentrating on the industrial market. I wonder if that's what drove the Armbian group to make a version of that OS for the Raspberry Pis?
(post is archived)