networking

Recently, I found myself in a situation where I had to connect to a Raspberry Pi to set it up for a presentation, but I did not have:

• A keyboard and/or other input device to use to type anything into the Pi
• An HDMI cable to connect the Pi to a display so I could view anything on the Pi
• A microSD card reader so I could modify the contents of the Pi's microSD card

Because of this, none of the standard methods of setting a static IP address, reconfiguring the Pi's WiFi configuration, or logging in on the Pi itself to find it's IP address or set things up so I could connect over a local network would work.

I remembered that Mac OS X handily includes an 'Internet Sharing' feature, which sets up a bridged network interface so your Mac is effectively a router and DHCP server to any devices connected to the shared interface.

In the midst of my work upgrading the Raspberry Pi Dramble to Raspbian Jessie Lite, I noticed one of the basic components of the architecture—static IP addresses for all the Raspberry Pis—was not working correctly anymore. My Ansible playbooks configured the /etc/network/interfaces file correctly, so it would define a static IP address for the eth0 interface (the built-in Ethernet port on the Pi):

In the past, with Raspbian Wheezy, everything worked fine, and the Pi would (after a reboot) use the static IP address 10.0.1.60.

tl;dr: The Orange Pi Plus offers much better specs, and much better performance, than a similarly-priced Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately—and this is the case with most RPi competitors at this time—setup, hardware support, and the smaller repository of documentation and community knowledge narrow this board's appeal to enthusiasts willing to debug annoying setup and configuration issues on their own.

A few months ago, I bought an Orange Pi Plus from AliExpress. It's a single-board Linux computer very similar to the Raspberry Pi, with a few key differences:

tl;dr You can get Gigabit networking working on any current Raspberry Pi (A+, B+, Pi 2 model B, Pi 3 model B), and you can increase the throughput to at least 300+ Mbps (up from the standard 100 Mbps connection via built-in Ethernet).

Note about model 3 B+: The Raspberry Pi 3 model B+ includes a Gigabit wired LAN adapter onboard—though it's still hampered by the USB 2.0 bus speed (so in real world use you get ~224 Mbps instead of ~950 Mbps). So if you have a 3 B+, there's no need to buy an external USB Gigabit adapter if you want to max out the wired networking speed!

Note: On Raspberry Pi models with built-in WiFi (e.g. the Raspberry Pi 3 model B), USB WiFi interfaces will use wlan1 (wlan0 is reserved for the first interface, in this case the internal one).

Since this is maybe the fourth time I've done this process on my Raspberry Pis, I decided to document the process of setting up cheap mini WiFi adapters on a Raspberry Pi A+/B+/2.

This process works great with any USB WiFi adapter that's supported out of the box. My three favorites (due to their inexpensive price and decent connection speed/reliability) are:

I spent the greater part of this afternoon trying to get my AirPort Express to connect to the Internet and share an IP address using a Motorola SB5101 Cable modem (with Charter Internet)... and since the solution was so simple and annoyingly stupid, I thought I'd post it here, for my reference and for anyone else spending an afternoon thinking his AirPort Express is dead.

As it turns out, the cable modem (this one, and likely many others) will only remember the MAC address of the first device it recognized when you last power cycled the modem.

When the Internet went down at my condo yesterday, I turned off my cable modem, plugged my Mac straight into it, turned the modem on, and use the internet via this direct connection for a while. When I plugged the AirPort Express back into the SB5101, I just got a flashing yellow (amber) light, and in the Airport Utility, a notice that the 'Internet Connection wasn't working'.