How to install nethserver on a banana pi

My Hardware is a banana pi m2 ultra (bpi m2u). I choose this one because it has 2 GB RAM instead of most other “mini-arm-pcs” with only 1 GB. I want to run it as a little “Secure-Box” with IPS, Firewall and Antivir to filter the incoming traffic, so I need some more RAM. You can install the system at a micro SD-Card, I take a 64 GB Class 10 card. Don’t use a to slow Card.

Now we start with downloading a CentOS Image for bpi m2u

Images for other bpi models are also at this site. The root password for these images is

bananapi

For copying the image at Windows or Mac to the SD Card we could use Barlena Etcher, you can download it at

Start it and choose the Image, the SD-Card and press on Flash. If it is ready you can put the card to your bpi.

For Linux unpack the image and copy with dd

sudo dd if=your_image_file_name.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress && sudo sync

where sdX is your SD-Card

If HDMI doesn‘t work, like mine, search for the IP of your bpi at your router or with a network scanner. The Name of the bpi was

bpi-biot-ros-ai

You connect to it via ssh at port 22.

Next I would install updates with

yum update

than install nethserver arm repository

yum installhttp://mirror.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.6.1810/arm-base/armhfp/Packages/nethserver-release-7-11.ns7.noarch.rpm

after that you can install nethserver with

nethserver-install

If it‘s finished, open your browser and go to:

https://IPofBPI:980

Follow the steps to configurate the nethserver installation.
If I looked to my Dashboard I wondered that I had only a 6 GB root partition.

For using the whole SD-Card for root partition you have to expand the root partition. Install cloud-utils-growpart with the following command at a terminal

yum install cloud-utils-growpart

and execute the command

rootfs-expand

Now we have a functional bpi nethserver.

Special thanks to @smutje1179 for his help by trying to get the bpi working, to @mrmarkuz for helping me with the installation and :rofl: Making the root partition great again :rofl:, to @mark_nl for his great work for arm-computers and of course the whole @arm_team

9 Likes

Any other bananapi users around that want to test this howto? If it turns out a 100% reproducable howto, this howto should get a spot in our wiki.

2 Likes

For a while now I am orientating on ARM single board discussions. But I can’t make much of it for there are so MANY! :slight_smile:

Pi here, Pine there, a banana and other Adafruits or Andruido…

How to make a choice with a sustainable path?

TIA

The Raspberry Pi really appears to be the 800-lb gorilla. There are plenty of other boards out there, many of which give better combinations of features and price, but I don’t think any of them have anywhere near the market share of the rPi. As a result, it’s probably going to have the best support for just about anything it can be made to do.

2 Likes

@medworthy
Hi Mark,
I tagged you because I I’ve read you did some tests with a bpi before.

1 Like

I got nethserver running on Odroid C1 which I believe is more suitable for this than RPi (can’t compare to BPi as I’ve never had one). I’ll post a how-to once I can create Topics.

So far I’ve noticed one problem with yum. After installing nethserver yum wouldn’t update, so I had to edit /etc/yum.repos.d/NethServer.repo
I had to disable [ce-sclo-rh] and [ce-sclo-sclo]
and for other repos that start with ce-* I had to comment mirrorlist= line and uncomment baseurl= line and change “centos” to “altarch” within the url. Example:
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$nsrelease/os/$basearch/
changed to
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/$nsrelease/os/$basearch/

Otherwise yum complains the that these repos are unavailable and I double checked the server and [ce-sclo-rh] and [ce-sclo-sclo] are not available for armhfp architecture on the server. Please correct me if did something inefficiently or incorrectly as I am coming from ArchLinux.

2 Likes

Here it is:

1 Like