Run your Raspberry Pi with wifi and static IP addresses

In this post I'm going to go through steps I took to get my quite old raspberry pi (Model B Rev. 2) up and running again for some future projects. We will install NOOBS, change hostname, setup the wifi, and finally we setup static IP addresses on the pi to make it easily available on our private network.

Installation

Installation is very easy if you follow the original raspberry pi instructions. You just download NOOBS, format your SD card with SD Formatter, and copy NOOBS files to your SD card. And then you boot your raspberri pi, and follow the instructions on the screen.

A couple of tools that will come handy after the installation are:

• Win32 Disk Imager to get backups of your SD card, after installing and configuration of different stuff. So spare some hard disk space on your computer for the backups.
• A good SSH client. I use mobaXterm. There are of course plenty of them out there. 

After NOOBS installation just run two below commands. It's good to run them every now and then to keep your pi updated and upgraded.

> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get upgrade

It's time now for a backup of your SD card using Win32 Disk Imager.

Hostname

It's a good idea to have your customized hostname for your pi, especially if you have a few of them in the same network. So here's how to change the hostname from the default "raspberrypi":

First edit the localhost entry in /etc/hosts, and change the line with "127.0.0.1 raspberrypi" to your desired hostname, here "mypi":

> sudo pico /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1    localhost 
::1          localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback 
ff02::1      ip6-allnodes 
ff02::2      ip6-allrouters 
127.0.1.1    mypi 

After this, you should also edit /etc/hostname file and change the content to mypi as above.

> sudo pico /etc/hostname
mypi

Now you can commit the changes and reboot your pi with the new hostname:

> sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh
> sudo reboot

After it boots you can test your hostname by running the command "hostname".

Wifi on pi

To setup your wifi correctly first we check the /etc/network/interfaces file. It should look like below. Note that both eth0 and wlan0 use dhcp. By the way I use Edimax EW-7811Un wifi adapter on my pi.

> sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces

# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
# Please note that this file is written to be used with dhcpcd
# For static IP, consult /etc/dhcpcd.conf and 'man dhcpcd.conf'

# Include files from /etc/network/interfaces.d:
source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Then to get wifi working you need to give the SSID name and your wifi password to your pi. Here's how to do it, you add the lines with "network=..." to wpa_supplicant.conf file:

> sudo pico /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

country=GB
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
    ssid="SSID_NAME"
    psk="YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD"
}

By now you should have both eth0 and wlan0 working with DHCP. Check that you get IP addresses on both of your interfaces by issuing "ifconfig".

Static IP addresses

You can set static IP addresses for your eth0 and wlan0 on your router if your router supports this function. In my case I am using a pretty cheap and simple router set up by our Internet and TV provider, and there are no options on it to do that. But there's another way, and that's from your raspberry pi. You edit /etc/dhcpcd.conf and add the lines below:

> sudo pico /etc/dhcpcd.conf

interface eth0

static ip_address=192.168.0.10/24
static routers=192.168.0.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.1

interface wlan0

static ip_address=192.168.0.11/24
static routers=192.168.0.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.1

In our case we have set up 192.168.0.10 for eth0 and 192.168.0.11 for wlan0 while our router's IP address is 192.168.0.1. Now you edit /etc/network/interfaces as below:

> sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

That's it! if you reboot your pi now, you will get the static IP addresses on it. Your pi is ready to rock and roll, but don't forget to backup your SD card before anything!