Part 2 - Provisioning

In Part One We talked about the hardware

Here, We will get Ubuntu on your MicroSD card. →→→→→→→→→

In Part Three We get everything set up to my personal liking, but ymmv.
In Part Four We get CoreDNS built
In Part Five We deploy and configure CoreDNS
In Part Six We add a few odds & ends to make the host more durable
And in Part Seven We add the bits for the eInk display

Provision the OS

So… like we said… soup to nuts… I’m assuming you have all the parts… but haven’t even powered on yer Pi yet.

What OS? Ubuntu

Rather than using Raspbian, I elected to use Ubuntu 22.04.
The crazy kids at Cannonical have been putting a lot of energy into getting Ubuntu working well on Raspberry Pis

They’ve written a pretty slick guide to installing Ubuntu on Raspberry Pis

Download The Ubuntu imager

Canonical’s Ubuntu Imager does a pretty neat job of doing some initial setup for you.. I’ve included links to it below.

MacOS

[https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/imager/imager_latest.dmg]https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/imager/imager_latest.dmg

Windows

[https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/imager/imager_latest.exe]https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/imager/imager_latest.exe

Linux

[https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/imager/imager_latest_amd64.deb]https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/imager/imager_latest_amd64.deb

OS Flavor

The imager will give you some options for images to burn to your SD card.

Select:

Other general-purpose OS
- Ubuntu
  - Ubuntu Server 22.04.01 LTS
    - 64-bit server OS for arm64 architectures

Next, Select your MicroSD card as the Storage/destination.

Then, click on the little gear icon and change a few of the advanced options.

Set the hostname.
Set the pi user password.

I strongly encourage you NOT to use wireless for your DNS Server.

As mentioned above… Don’t use wireless connectivity for your DNS server.

This advise is partially because it can cause chicken-or-egg problems.
It is partially because it can cause hosts querying your dns server to make multiple requests because some were lost, causing increased latency.

Mostly though, it’s from the philosophy that for critical parts of your infrastructure a good practice is to reduce as many potential sources of weirdness.

Bear in mind, DNS requests are mostly¹ handled over UDP…

There’s a joke about UDP…. I’d tell it to you… but you wouldn’t get it.

Okay, so at this point, your SD card aught be flashed, and you should be ready to power on your pi, and get to configuring

⬅⃖⃖ Back to Hardware

…Continue to base configuration ➡⃗⃗

When do DNS queries use TCP vs UDP ↩︎