Boot a headless Raspberry Pi w/out router access and find it on the network.

pi-booter.md

Headless - No Router Access - Pi Booter

If you are trying to boot a headless setup of Raspbian and don't have access to the router the following may be what you are looking for.

• Download the latest Raspbian Lite

• Use an OS image flasher like Etcher to flash your Raspbian dmg file onto a microSD card.

• Once the microSD card has been flashed you will want to do some configuration

  • From the terminal $ cd /Volumns/boot
  • Create an ssh file $ touch ssh
  • Create a file for preloading your network settings $ touch wpa_supplicant.conf
  • open up the wpa_supplicant.conf file and add the following:

  network={
    ssid="YOUR_WIFI_NETWORK_NAME"
    psk="YOUR_NETWORK_PASSWORD"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  }

• Eject the microSD card and pop it into your Pi (you must be out of the /boot dir in your terminal)

• Give the Pi a minute or two to boot, then check the devices on the network for the Pi and get its IP address

  • If you are on your home network, enter your IP address into the browser and log in to your router.
    • Grab the IP address of your PI which should be in a list of devices connected to your network.
  • If you are on a network that you don't have Admin access to the router you will want to scan for the Pi.
    • Use nmap to scan the subnet for connected devices $ sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24

• One you have the PI's IP address you can ssh into it $ ssh pi@<YOUR_PI_IP_ADDRESS>

  • You will be asked to authenticate the Pi and then for its password which is raspberry.

  FIN!