[PLUG] How best to connect a subnet of Pi Zeros? (Eric House)

Eric House eehouse at eehouse.org
Thu Jan 28 18:52:46 UTC 2021


>> What are you planning to do with these Zeros? Are they going to be part
>>  of a cluster or just doing randomly things independently of each other?

> For now I'll be happy to have them online and reachable by name from the
> rest of my network.

I've got this working, so thought I'd report on what was involved, if only
so I can find it when I accidentally wipe a micro-sd card. :-)

First, I was actually mixing two problems: add a handful of usb gadgets and
running a DMZ over an existing ethernet cable.

The second problem I solved with 802.1Q by buying a smart switch for my
office and, on it and on the existing gateway router's switch, tagging the
existing VLAN and a new DMZ VLAN. One port of the new switch is tagged for
the DMZ and so the Pi4 that hosts the Zeros when it plugs into that port is
isolated in the DMZ.

The first problem I solved by bridging all usb<N> interfaces with the eth0
interface on the Pi4. /etc/network/interfaces is this simple (for two
Zeros):

allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet manual
    up brctl addif br0 $IFACE

allow-hotplug usb1
iface usb1 inet manual
    up brctl addif br0 $IFACE

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
    # Use eth0's mac for consistent IP DHCP addr assignment
    bridge_hw aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
    bridge_ports eth0 regex usb.*

Unfortunately as my Zero collection grows I'll need to repeat the three
per-iface lines over and over, but I can't find any regex-based way around
it.

Oh, and I had to disable avahi. It's possible that having done so will
prevent other uses of usb in the future.

# sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon.service

Anyway, thanks for the pointers getting me started!

--Eric
-- 
My g-bike can trounce your e-bike!



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