raspbian-ua-netinst

The minimal Raspbian unattended netinstaller for Raspberry Pi Model B and Model B+.

This project provides Raspbian power users the possibility to install a minimal base system unattended using latest Raspbian packages regardless when the installer was built.

The installer with default settings configures eth0 with DHCP to get Internet connectivity and completely wipes the SD card from any previous installation.

There are different kinds of "presets" that define the default packages that are going to be installed. Currently, the default one is called server which installs only the essential base system packages including NTP and OpenSSH to provide a sane minimal base system that you can immediately after install ssh in and continue installing your software.

Other presets include minimal which has even less packages (no logging, no text editor, no cron) and base which doesn't even have networking. You can customize the installed packages by adding a small configuration file to your SD card before booting up.

Features

• completely unattended, you only need working Internet connection through the Ethernet port
• DHCP and static ip configuration (DHCP is the default)
• always installs the latest version of Raspbian
• configurable default settings
• extra configuration over HTTP possible - gives unlimited flexibility
• installation takes about 15 minutes with fast Internet from power on to sshd running
• fits in 512MB SD card
• default install includes fake-hwclock to save time on shutdown
• default install includes NTP to keep time
• /tmp is mounted as tmpfs to improve speed
• no clutter included, you only get the bare essential packages
• option to install root to USB drive

Requirements

• a Raspberry Pi Model B or Model B+
• SD card of at least 512MB (or at least 64MB for USB root install)
• working Ethernet with Internet connectivity

Obtaining installer files on Windows and Mac

Installer archive is around 9MB and contains all firmware files and the installer.

Go to our latest release page and download the .zip file.

Format your SD card as FAT32 (MS-DOS on Mac OS X) and extract the installer files in.
Note: If you get an error saying it can't mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 on /boot then the most likely cause is that you're using exFAT instead of FAT32. Try formatting the SD card with this tool: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

Alternative method for Mac, writing image to SD card

Prebuilt image is around 9MB bzip2 compressed and 31MB uncompressed. It contains the same files as the .zip but is more convenient for Mac users.

Go to our latest release page and download the .img.bz2 file.

Extract the .img file from the archive with bunzip2 raspbian-ua-netinst-<latest-version-number>.img.bz2.
Find the /dev/diskX device you want to write to using diskutil list. It will probably be 1 or 2.

To flash your SD card on Mac:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
sudo dd bs=1m if=/path/to/raspbian-ua-netinst-<latest-version-number>.img of=/dev/rdiskX
diskutil eject /dev/diskX

Note the r in the of=/dev/rdiskX part on the dd line which should speed up writing the image considerably.

SD card image for Linux

Prebuilt image is around 6MB xz compressed and 31MB uncompressed. It contains the same files as the .zip but is more convenient for Linux users.

Go to our latest release page and download the .img.xz file.

To flash your SD card on Linux:

xzcat /path/to/raspbian-ua-netinst-<latest-version-number>.img.xz > /dev/sdX

Replace /dev/sdX with the real path to your SD card.

Installing

In normal circumstances, you can just power on your Pi and cross your fingers.

If you don't have a display attached you can monitor the Ethernet card leds to guess activity. When it finally reboots after installing everything you will see them going out and on a few times when Raspbian configures it on boot.

If you do have a display, you can follow the progress and catch any possible errors in the default configuration or your own modifications.

Note: During the installation you'll see various warning messages, like "Warning: cannot read table of mounted file systems" and "dpkg: warning: ignoring pre-dependency problem!". Those are expected and harmless.

Logging

The output of the installation process is now also logged to file.
When the installation completes successfully, the logfile is moved to /var/log/raspbian-ua-netinst.log on the installed system.
When an error occurs during install, the logfile is moved to the sd card, which gets normally mounted on /boot/ and will be named raspbian-ua-netinst-<datetimestamp>.log

First boot

The system is almost completely unconfigured on first boot. Here are some tasks you most definitely want to do on first boot.

The default root password is raspbian.

Set new root password: passwd (can also be set during installation using rootpw in installer-config.txt)
Configure your default locale: dpkg-reconfigure locales
Configure your timezone: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The latest kernel and firmware packages are now automatically installed during the unattended installation process. When you need a kernel module that isn't loaded by default, you will still have to configure that manually. When a new kernel becomes available in the archives and is installed, the system will update config.txt, so it boots up the new kernel at the next reboot.

Optional: apt-get install raspi-copies-and-fills for improved memory management performance.
Optional: Create a swap file with dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=512 && mkswap /swap (example is 512MB) and enable it on boot by appending /swap none swap sw 0 0 to /etc/fstab.

Reinstalling or replacing an existing system

If you want to reinstall with the same settings you did your first install you can just move the original config.txt back and reboot. Make sure you still have kernel_install.img and installer.cpio.gz in your /boot partition. If you are replacing your existing system which was not installed using this method, make sure you copy those two files in and the installer config.txt from the original image.

mv /boot/config-reinstall.txt /boot/config.txt
reboot

Remember to backup all your data and original config.txt before doing this!

Installer customization

While defaults should work for most power users, some might want to customize default configuration or the package set even further. The installer provides support for this by reading a configuration file installer-config.txt from the first vfat partition. The configuration file is read in as a shell script so you can abuse that fact if you so want to. See scripts/etc/init.d/rcS for more details what kind of environment your script will be run in (currently 'busybox sh').

If an installer-config.txt file exists in the same directory as this README.md, it will be added to the installer image automatically.

The format of the file and the current defaults:

preset=server
packages= # comma separated list of extra packages
mirror=http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/
release=wheezy
hostname=pi
domainname=
rootpw=raspbian
cdebootstrap_cmdline=
bootsize=+50M # /boot partition size in megabytes, provide it in the form '+<number>M' (without quotes)
rootsize=     # / partition size in megabytes, provide it in the form '+<number>M' (without quotes), leave empty to use all free space
timeserver=time.nist.gov
ip_addr=dhcp
ip_netmask=0.0.0.0
ip_broadcast=0.0.0.0
ip_gateway=0.0.0.0
ip_nameservers=
online_config= # URL to extra config that will be executed after installer-config.txt
usbroot= # set to 1 to install to first USB disk
cmdline="dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 elevator=deadline"
rootfstype=ext4
rootfs_mkfs_options=
rootfs_install_mount_options='noatime,data=writeback,nobarrier,noinit_itable'
rootfs_mount_options='errors=remount-ro,noatime'

All of the configuration options should be clear. You can override any of these in your installer-config.txt.
The time server is only used during installation and is for rdate which doesn't support the NTP protocol.
Note: You only need to provide the options which you want to override in your installer-config.txt file.
All non-provided options will use the defaults as mentioned above.

Available presets: server, minimal and base.

Presets set the cdebootstrap_cmdline variable. For example, the current server default is:

--flavour=minimal --include=kmod,fake-hwclock,ifupdown,net-tools,isc-dhcp-client,ntp,openssh-server,vim-tiny,iputils-ping,wget,ca-certificates,rsyslog,dialog,locales,less,man-db

There's also support for a post-install.txt script which is executed just before unmounting the filesystems. You can use it to tweak and finalize your automatic installation. Just like above, if post-install.txt exists in the same directory as this README.md, it will be added to the installer image automatically.

Disclaimer

We take no responsibility for ANY data loss. You will be reflashing your SD card anyway so it should be very clear to you what you are doing and will lose all your data on the card. Same goes for reinstallation.

See LICENSE for license information.