Raspberry Pi

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Fix for Ethernet Connection Drop on Raspberry Pi

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

Raspberry_Pi_Ethernet_Port.jpg

The Problem

Today an engineer from BT was fiddling with the junction box outside my house, and my modem dropped connection to my router. At the time, the router did not automatically force reconnect (my fault, I hadn’t configured it to do so). When I noticed what had happened, I reconnected to the modem. So far so good. A couple of hours later, I noticed that two of my three Pi (all of which are connected with ethernet cables) had not reconnected to the router. The one that did reconnect is running Raspbmc (XBMC port to Raspberry Pi); the two that did not are running Apache with some bits on top (a mail server, owncloud, and wordpress for this website!). This is a pain because not only did it take the services offline, but I was unable to SSH to the Pi to correct the problem. Removing and reconnecting the ethernet cables did not work, so in the end I had to pull the power and reboot.

Install OwnCloud on your Raspberry Pi

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

Owncloud Logo OwnCloud is a free (libre), open source equivalent to DropBox. As well as the program you install on your server, it has free desktop sync clients for Linux, Windows and Mac, and apps for Android and iOS. I’m just going to cover the server side of things for your Pi in this tutorial, because the desktop client can be found in the Ubuntu repos, and the app is on the Play Store. If you want the Android app free of charge, then install it via F-Droid.

Speed up your Pi by booting to a USB flash drive

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

Raspberry Pi USB flash drive

Intro

If you’ve read some of the other articles on the site, you may have gathered that I have three RasPis doing useful things around my home:

  • Pi #1 is running Raspbmc, an XBMC media centre port for the Raspberry Pi.
  • Pi #2 is running this website plus an email server.
  • Pi #3 is running the Dropbox replacement OwnCloud.

All three of these ran reasonably quickly out of the box, but because the Pi is such a low powered device, every little performance boost helps. Having said that, this is no small improvement, and the performance gain is instantly apparent.