Workspace Configuration

Managing Remote Access

Yesterday’s post included a reminder that when setting up a new Pi it is important to change the default password of the pi user. In most distributed computing environments is it also best practice to create individual user accounts to manage access to the various nodes on the network.

My preference is to have a user that can access each node without needing to type a password. This is accomplished with our favorite remote access tool SSH.

Passwordless SSH access

I followed the steps outlined below with reference to this guideline from the RPi Foundation.

1. Create a new user on each node and switch to it

As the pi user I can set up a new user for myself.

sudo adduser michael

sudo usermod -a -G adm,dialout,cdrom,sudo,audio,video,plugdev,games,users,input,netdev,gpio,i2c,spi michael

michael then has permission to act as a sudoer, so I finished the rest of my work on the node logged in as this user using su (swtich user).

sudo su - michael

2. Finish raspi-config as new user

sudo raspi-config

raspi-config brings up an interactive menu. Here I set the hostname and timezone.

3. Copy the workspace SSH public key to the node

From my main computer I use ssh-copy-id which will install my public key onto the node.

ssh-copy-id michael@node1

The resulting output:

Number of key(s) added:        1

Result

Following this process on each node makes it easy to use my main computer as a workspace and perform tasks. Now that I can connect to each node individually, my next goal is to install Ansible and dive into what sort of automations I can tinker with.

Additionally, because I know Ansible only needs to be installed on one node and its agentless operation requires SSH access, I have also generated an SSH key on node1 and copied the ID to all the other nodes so that Ansible will be able to perform actions as michael.