As I wrote yesterday, I want to install BSD on a unused Dell server that I’ve got. Before I could get started with that, I had a problem. That problem was getting the server onto my network. It doesn’t have a WiFi card and I’m not sure how well BSD would work with a USB network interface. Since the eero is upstairs, that meant setting up a WiFi to Ethernet bridge. Enter an ancient Raspberry Pi I had on my shelf.
This first-generation RPi was bought when it was released in 2012 and probably hadn’t been used since 2020. Happily, it booted up no problem and I managed to find the password in an old Apple Note. The first thing I needed to do was update the operating system from Debian Stretch to something a little newer so I could upgrade the packages. I thought about going all the way to the most recent Debian version, but figured I’d just go up one version to Buster to keep things simple.
The upgrade wasn’t too problematic except I had to step away from my system for a few minutes and it went to sleep and broke the connection in the middle of the upgrade. Oops. I found a nice post on how to fix that and was able to get through the rest of the upgrade without issue.
Next, I needed to setup the bridge. There are some good articles about how to do that with Network Manager, but that isn’t part of Buster so I needed something that just used iptables and dnsmasq. I found a few on that topic, but this one had very clear instructions.
It had been a while since I’ve done this sort of thing and it was nice to find a recipe. After working through it, I was able to connect to my laptop using Ethernet. The performance isn’t great but it should work for my experiment.
The first yak has been shaved. How many more will there be?