Time now for compute. Grab a network cable and connect the ethernet port on the Pi to the ethernet port on your laptop. On boot, the Pi will look to a DHCP server for it’s IP address. I used tftpd64 from Jounin to run a local DHCP server on my laptop. For some reason chrome’s safe browsing was alerting on the domain for tftpd. You are free to use whatever means you want to provide DHCP to your Pi. Setup your DHCP server by specifying which network interface you want it to run on, define your pool, and setup your DHCP options to hand out a subnet mask and default router.

My tftpd settings

Make sure you’ve inserted your SD card and then apply power to the Pi and watch your DHCP server log. The log will tell you when your Pi has pulled an address and which address it pulled.

Here we see that the Pi has pulled IP address 10.3.3.50

We’ll need an SSH client to communicate with the Pi. My personal fave is putty. Grab a copy of it and put it somewhere that’s easy to remember. Open a command prompt and start off by pinging the Pi to ensure we’ve got good communication.

If you get something other than replies you can reference this to figure out what your error means. A few things I would check first would be:

Does the Pi have power? Is the ethernet cable plugged in securely to your computer/Pi? Do you have link lights (yellow/green) on the Pi? Did you see the Pi grab an IP address from your DHCP server?

Depending on the laptop you are using, you may need to use an ethernet crossover cable. Instead of the cable, you can insert a cheap switch between your Pi and laptop.

Moving on. SSH to the Pi and we’ll finish setting up the OS.

>c:\putty.exe -ssh pi@10.3.3.50

I placed my putty executable on the root of my C drive. The default username for the Pi is… pi . Accept the security cert and use raspberry as the password. You are rewarded with a friendly shell.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $

Use sudo raspi-config and do the following:

Enable SSH permanently by going to Interfacing Options -> SSH

Change user password

Change hostname

Expand the file system which is now under Advanced Options

Make sure each of your Pis has a different hostname. I’m going headless (no monitor) on all my Pis so I also go into Advanced Options and change the Memory Split to 16 since I’m not using the GPU. Compute is now complete.