Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Manual pages
: Most commands come with a manual that describes the usage
of the command in more detail. For example, to read the manual for the
top
application, type
man top
. Use the arrow keys to scroll and press
Q
to quit.
•
Built-in help
: Most commands can be asked to print out a help text about
their usage. The two most common arguments are
--help
and
-h
. For
example, to see the help text for the
ls
command, type
ls --help
.
Accessing the Pi over the network using
SSH
Pretty much all the pranks and projects in this topic will be done at the command
line while being remotely logged in to the Pi over the network through SSH. Before
we can do that, we need to be sure our Pi is reachable and we need to know its IP
address. First we'll look at wired networks, then at Wi-Fi.
Wired network setup
So you've plugged an Ethernet patch cable into the Pi and connected it to your home
router, now what? Well, there should be all kinds of blinking lights both around the
port of your router and on your Pi. The next thing that needs to happen is for the
router to assign an IP address to the Pi using
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
(
DHCP
). DHCP is a common service on network equipment that hands out unique
IP addresses to all computers that want to join the network.
Let's have a look at the address assigned to the Ethernet port (
eth0
) on the Pi itself
using the following command:
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ ip addr show eth0
If your DHCP service is working correctly, you should see a line similar to the
following output:
inet 192.168.1.20/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global eth0
The digits between
inet
and the
/
character is your Pi's IP address,
192.168.1.20
in
this case.
If your output doesn't have a line beginning with
inet
, it's most likely that your
router lacks a DHCP service, or that the service needs to be enabled or configured.
Exactly how to do this is outside the scope of this topic, but try the manual for your
router and search for
dhcp
.
