Raspberry Pi

Cockbook

My collection of hints, tips and tricks (supporting my memory and maybe also helping others).

Mounting USB drives

• Automount USB-Drives in Raspbian

• Slow USB drive performance?
  • Mount with option 'noatime' or 'relatime'
  • Mount without option sync (e.g. keep default async)
  • Auto mount done by OpenElec:

/dev/sda1 on /var/media/Holyhead type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)

Samba server / NAS

• How to install?
  • Raspberry Pi: Samba Server installieren (German)
  • Low Budget NAS mit einem Raspberry PI (German)

• Slow performance?
  • see 'Slow USB drives' above
  • use Raspbian, etc without GUI to get as much CPU power for file-transfer as possible (OpenELEC or RaspBMC constantly result in about 10-20% CPU load when idle, use top to check!)

Misc Q&A

• Q: Why does my Pi restart when hotplugging a USB drive?
  • [1]
  • [2]

• Q: Does Raspberry support WOL?

A: No: the Ethernet chip is connected via USB ([3])

• Q: The new password is to short.

A: Try adjusting the PAM settings, see Google search for 'pam password minimum length'

• Q: How to configure static IP?

A: In /etc/network/interfaces:

 iface eth0 inet static
   address 192.168.0.31
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   gateway 192.168.0.1

• Q: How to read core temperature, etc?

A: vcgencmd: $vcgencmd measure_temp

• External USB HDD spin down

hdparm does not work with my WD Elements (SG_IO: bad host status: 0x7)

hd-idle (archive 'hd-idle_1.04.tar' from [4] (German)) hd-idle -i 0 -a sda -i 10 shuts down my HD, but I am not yet sure if standby-time is properly working

Things I might try sometime

• bfq IO scheduler BFQ to increase throughput

• Overclocking via raspi-config (e.g. [5] (German))

• Mathematica on Raspberry Pi, for free

• wikipedia:Raspcontrol

• NAS/Samba
  • try adjusting 'socket options' in (/etc/samba/smb.conf) to increase NAS performance: some websites recommend to disable the 'socket options', some recommend to set: socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=65536 SO_SNDBUF=65536
  • adjust memory split - smaller GPU memory for server
  • ext4 vs ntfs for storage drive

Some links

• Out Of Box Software (Recommended)

Blogs, forums, etc:

• www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/
• Stm Labs Forum / Raspbmc
• Wel!s Blog (German)
• Raspberry Pi Blog of Jan Karres (German)

• Raspberry Pi in Wikipedia

Manuals

• The Debian Administrator's Handbook