Raspberry Pi as Jumpbox

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Been playing around with the recent Raspbian release from last month - Jessie with Pixel...

If you have a Pi2/3 - it's worth checking out - the UI updates are nice, but the real value is the modern browser (Chromium) and RealVNC server...

A common question for many is how to remotely admin their router (esp. on the AsusWRT subforums), and the common approach is either to enable SSH, or enable the WebGUI - both of which are extremely risky...

Raspbian has a full-on OpenSSH implementation, and can be directed to whatever port one wants, and one can lock it down pretty tight...

The alt approach would be to just port forward port 5900 and use RealVNC - the RealVNC viewer software is free to use, and the PIXEL includes a free server license...

The caveat here is that RealVNC will use the "pi" user account credentials as a default to login to VNC, so one should absolutely change the password from the default to something more robust...

As you can see below - the broswer works just fine here - Pi2 is a bit slow, Pi3 is much better - I wouldn't recommend doing this with Pi1 or PiZero - but one can always try.

If folks are interested, I'll go a bit more into details on how to make this work, but Pi as a jumpbox makes a lot of sense rather than exposing the Router directly...

 

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Someone has built a VMWare management image for PiA/B...

If one is running ESXi inside the LAN, this can be a useful tool...

http://xtravirt.com/product-information/vpi

 

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Just as a quick heads up and security concern with Raspbian - since it ships with OpenSSH Server active (and pre-configured), it is important to regenerate the ssh keys -- do this before even considering exposing the Pi to the public internet...

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* && dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

And like I mentioned above, definitely change the "pi" user account password - there's other things that can be done to improve security...

(and the advice above about regenerating the ssh host keys are also applicable to VM appliance images that one can get for VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox)

 

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Based on another discussion in the Asus sub-forums - wonder if anyone has used the USB port on the router to power a Pi - putting a USB power bank in the middle would minimize power spikes to the router, and provide good/clean power to the Pi...

And then just plug the Pi into an available LAN port on the router itself... see below

 

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the upside with above is that if the router is reset, one doesn't lose power to the Pi - which can be useful in cases like router SW dev/config - example being having USB to Serial from the Pi to the router's UART...

 

[mtganzer]

Someone has built a VMWare management image for PiA/B...

If one is running ESXi inside the LAN, this can be a useful tool...

http://xtravirt.com/product-information/vpi

I can't get a download for it, but per the web page seems like it may not have been updated for a while (since ESXi 5.1?). I have to admit I don't do a lot of CLI management of my home server (mainly just spinning up or tearing down test VM's), so I just use SSH port forwarding for ESXi management either with vSphere client or the new WebUI in 6.0. The vSphere client works if the local port forwards are bound to any loopback address EXCEPT 127.0.0.1.

 

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I can't get a download for it, but per the web page seems like it may not have been updated for a while (since ESXi 5.1?). I have to admit I don't do a lot of CLI management of my home server (mainly just spinning up or tearing down test VM's), so I just use SSH port forwarding for ESXi management either with vSphere client or the new WebUI in 6.0. The vSphere client works if the local port forwards are bound to any loopback address EXCEPT 127.0.0.1.

The web store is non-obvious, but select a quantity of "1", and it should take you to checkout from there...

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com - might come in handy

 

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Based on another discussion in the Asus sub-forums - wonder if anyone has used the USB port on the router to power a Pi - putting a USB power bank in the middle would minimize power spikes to the router, and provide good/clean power to the Pi...

Trying to use host machine to power the Pi is not recommended - seems that the microUSB port and how the Pi handshakes (it doesn't), some hosts will drop to nominal power which in the USB spec is 100 miliAmps, which is not enough to reliably power a Pi, even a PiZero.. so wall power is the right way there...

 

[mtganzer]

The web store is non-obvious, but select a quantity of "1", and it should take you to checkout from there...

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com - might come in handy

Managed to get it, and the image is definitely not been updated since 2013. I didn't have time to put it on a Pi, but looking at the release notes, it doesn't look like anything you could not already download for free as tarballs from VMware.

 

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Managed to get it, and the image is definitely not been updated since 2013. I didn't have time to put it on a Pi, but looking at the release notes, it doesn't look like anything you could not already download for free as tarballs from VMware.

They haven't updated their image in a long time... but as you suggest, there are other ways

I not very inclined to help out VMWare at the moment, as I'm getting really tired of the client/desktop costing there...

Even with their promo periods for upgrades - it gets tiresome, and I've been moving away from that ecosystem in any event...