Well, it happened again. Another customer with Vantage phones and no HTTP server. This time they didn’t even have an Application server for me to use my VMware trick. I needed to get a really low cost http server to work.
Raspberry pi to the rescue!!! I really love these devices. I’m finding so many practical uses for these. (I even set one up to do video for a customer’s booth at a trade show last week.) They run a flavor of debian (You can even run a scaled back version of Ubuntu) so I’m in my comfort zone. The following documents how I got this working as the HTTP server for the IPO. I think I’m going to try o use this to do OpenVPN as well so I have remote access to the IPO.
Step 1 – Install Raspbian
There are many versions of raspbian but for this deployment all I need is a headless server so Raspbian Buster Lite is perfect for me as it does not have a GUI which would just be consuming unnecessary resources. You can download the latest version here.
After downloading the zip file, you will need to flash the OS onto the SD card for your pi. To do this I use Etcher. Using the application is pretty simple. You select the image, target SD Card and click flash.
Setup the HTTP Server
Once the SD Card has been flashed, you can pop it into the pi and boot it up. For the intial setup you will need an HDMI display. The default username and password are pi:raspberry.
You can find details on how to enable ssh here. Once you have downloaded this you can use a program like Putty to ssh in and run the following commands to update and install Apache HTTP server.
user@computer$ sudo apt-get update
user@computer$ sudo apt-get upgrade
user@computer$ sudo apt-get install apache2
You can test the web server by navigating to the ip address of the pi in your browser. You should see a page like this:
Configuration of Web Server
From this point the configuration is essentially the same as any other apache server. I have documented this in my previous post here.
