Where is the image?

[rjcorwin]

Cool project! Open Learning Exchange is working on almost exactly the same problem. I would love to check out your image. Where's the download? Right now we're using Occidentalis with its http://raspberrypi.local/config to give each node a unique name on the network.

[dismantl]

Thanks! I am still doing some tweaking to the image, but I imagine it will be available for download sometime next week. I'll link to it from the README.md document. Occidentalis looks cool too, but I haven't tried it. From its list of features, it looks like most of them have been incorporated into the main Raspbian distro, so you might want to try that as well. It might be more up-to-date in some aspects.

If you're interested in customizing an image, I found this to be the easiest way. Run this from your computer, with a recent download of the image you want to customize:

1. sudo kpartx -av # this will create a device map from the partitions on the image, and put them in something like /dev/mapper/loop0p1 and /dev/mapper/loop0p2
2. sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt # mount the root filesystem into /mnt
3. Make any customizations you want to the filesystem in /mnt, such as custom desktop background, bash prompt, hostname, etc. Two very useful things to customize are /mnt/etc/network/interfaces (for networking configuration) and /mnt/etc/rc.local (for commands to run on boot)
4. sudo umount /mnt && sudo kpartx -dv

Now your image is all your own and can be redistributed easily :)

[rjcorwin]

Thanks for the advice Dan! It's a good idea to track Raspbian. Looking for their release notes... That's a nice trick for opening an image and closing it back up again.

On the /config script in Occidentalis, I realized today that I was wrong that it is included in Occidentalis. It's only there after you install the Adafruit WebIDE. https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-WebIDE It's a node.js server that exposes /config.

That hostname field then gets fed into changehostname.sh. This makes the raspberrypi hostname a good default way to set yourself up as long as there isn't two Pi's trying to configure themselves from raspberrypi.local at the same time.

I'm thinking about carving out that code into a node.js server that might offer more useful tools related to ground computing; like a list of links to hosts broadcasting on mDNS, perhaps even links to CouchApps on those hosts. That way if you know one hostname, you can get to the others from a browser.

[anthroprose]

Dan: would you have any interest in having some configuration management added to this?
https://github.com/anthroprose/rpi-mesh

I will gladly contribute a mediagrid chef cookbook that will allow people to setup any linux based system to be a mediagrid node instead of having to deal with complete images.

[dismantl]

anthroprose: Interesting idea. I'm not very familiar with Chef. How do you think MediaGrid could benefit from it? Is this something that would allow someone to create their own custom mesh network (like with certain IP addressing schemes, hostnaming, olsrd configurations, etc)?

[anthroprose]

Thats the idea, it will produce an end-state required for a working system. You could then create images with the result.

Idea is that it gives you a cross-platform method for configuring services, templating files, etc...

Instead of having a bunch of seperate scripts and configs checked in, you have a definition that will produce an system having those files in the correct places, with variable values, etc..