Unattended Boot and Install

This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. (Last edited by Sodface on 29 Apr 2022.)

Introduction

This wiki describes a modified version of the original method I posted for Headless installation on a Raspberry Pi.

Method 1: Proxy ARP

These steps result in a working solution where hosts on the wired side and hosts on the wireless side are all in the same ip network. There are no frills added, such as dhcp or automatic route entries for the wired hosts. Each wired host needs to have a manually configured IP address and an entry manually added to the bridge host's routing table.

Note: For your wired hosts, use IP addresses in the same IP range as the rest of your network but outside of the scope used by a local DHCP server, if applicable. You may need to reduce your DHCP scope to free up IP addresses for this purpose.

Configure the network interfaces on your bridge host:

Contents of /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp hostname wyse3030-3 auto eth0 iface eth0 inet manual pre-up ifconfig $IFACE up pre-down ifconfig $IFACE down

Notice that the wireless interface (wlan0) uses dhcp from the home network as usual and that an IP address is not used at all on the wired interface (eth0).

Enable and create a local start-up script to add route entries at boot:

# rc-update add local default # touch /etc/local.d/RouteAdd.start # chmod +x /etc/local.d/RouteAdd.start