Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

When I bought my first RPi, I bought a kit that included a cheap clear case. It works but I wanted something nicer looking for sitting on my TV stand in my living room. It was love at first sight for the FLIRC case. I'd like to talk about it below.

Ever since Nintendo announced that they were stopping production of the NES Classic (after what felt like months of purposely under-producing to drive up the demand/price), I've been wanting to get another Raspberry Pi and setup RetroPie on it to play the games of my childhood. Well, I recently celebrated a birthday and got a few Amazon gift cards (which I enjoy very much), so I pulled the trigger on a second RPi, which I'm dedicating specifically to RetroPie and duties. In this article, I'd like to go over configuring the RetroPie. I'm going to assume that you've already got your ROMs and I will not be covering the installation of RetroPie in this post. If you've ever setup an RPi, it's the same process. If you have not and this is your first time, then check out my recent post about the process  (It's titled for installing CentOS v7, but the process is the same for installing just about any OS to the Raspberry Pi).

As mentioned before, I'm setting up a LAMP stack using Cent OS v7 on my Raspberry Pi 3. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The A for Apache could also be E for Nginx (pronounced like Engine-Ecks) and the P for PHP could also be P for Perl or Python. This software together forms what's referred to as a "stack", which is simply a common development term for a set of software that works together for a specific application. In this post, I'll be covering the installation and initial configuration of Apache, MySQL and PHP.

I touched on SSH configuration in my post about performing the initial configuration on my CentOS Pi . Aside from one tweak to the config file, there wasn't a lot to do. In this post, I'm going to dive a bit deeper into how SSH Keys work, how to set it up in your environment, and then I'll dive a bit deeper into locking down the SSH configuration.

I've recently gotten a Raspberry Pi 3 and I've installed the ARM build of CentOS v7 on it so that I can have a small server to play around with some web stuff. My experience in IT has been largely Windows Server focused (AD, Exchange, System Center, etc.), storage, virtualization, backups, etc. Not much Linux or development exposure. I'd like to learn more about that area of IT, so I picked up a Pi and am creating an environment at home to learn more about Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL and Git. In this post, I'm going to talk about the initial configuration of CentOS after you've installed it on your Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is awesome. If you're like me, you bought one to tool around with for educational purposes. You can run Kodi or gaming console emulators on it or you can combine some together for a tiny OpenStack cluster. At, $50-$60, they're easy on the wallet and running off of 5v USB power makes them pretty energy efficient. Sure, it's only a 1Ghz ARM processor which limits your OS choices but I'd rather have a Pi than running an old Dell PowerEdge or HP Proliant that I bought off of Craigslist. Instead of installing the usual Raspbian OS, this guide is on installing CentOS 7. However, the process described below is relatively universal to whatever OS you want to install on your Pi.