Introduction

The purpose of this project is to serve as a template for quickly setting up a simple set of webpages for monitoring of remote services that could effect your organizations network (i.e. power, weather, etc.). In addition to the webpages, the necessary configuration information needed to setup a Raspberry Pi too quickly and efficiently display the monitoring information is also included.

This project took advantage of Raspberry Pi’s with external displays to display crucial network and environmental events, as well as provide a simple interface to access multiple monitoring services. What is monitored, is up to you.

Raspberry Pi Setup

Operating System

Raspbian Lite

This approach uses a non-GUI based OS to free up the system resources to run a web application only.

Login

The default login for the pi is as follows

username: pi password: raspberry

It is strongly recommended that you change the default password for the pi user.

Device Configuration

Set Hostname

System Configuration can be done by issuing the sudo raspi-config command from the terminal. This will bring up a blue screen in which you can edit the device settings like the Hostname, SSH connectivity, and VNC access if you desire. In this case having both VNC and SSH are necessary for our use case.

List to edit in raspi-config

• Hostname: nocviewX
  • Replace X with the current display number
• Enable SSH
• Enable VNC
  • When prompted hit Y + Enter to install the necessary components

Set Pi display to use full display

Guide

Back up the config file and then update it using these commands.

sudo cp /boot/config.txt /boot/config.txt.backup

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

After doing this #disable_overscan=1 (Remove the #) and then comment all overscan parameters.

#overscan_left=10
#overscan_right=10
#overscan_top=15
#overscan_bottom=15

Exit Ctrl + X press Y and Enter

Setup GUI and Web Browser

Guide

Setup Minimum Environment for GUI Applications

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg x11-xserver-utils xinit openbox

Install Web Browser

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends chromium-browser

Configure Openbox

sudo nano /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart

# Disable any form of screen saver / screen blanking / power management
xset s off
xset s noblank
xset -dpms

# Allow quitting the X server with `CTRL`-`ALT`-`Backspace`
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

# Start Chromium in kiosk mode
sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly":false/"exited_cleanly":true/' ~/.config/chromium/'Local State'
sed -i 's/"exited_cleanly":false/"exited_cleanly":true/; s/"exit_type":"[^"]\+"/"exit_type":"Normal"/' ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences
chromium-browser --disable-infobars --start-fullscreen 'http://your-url-here'

Test server - this will only work if you are on the local device only

startx -- -nocursor

Start X automatically on boot

sudo nano .bash_profile

[[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && startx -- -nocursor

Usage tips

• If Chromium (or the X server) crashes, press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server and restart it with startx -- -nocursor.
• If you need a terminal session, you can switch to one of the other consoles by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F2 (or any other function key). Pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 brings you back to the first console where Chromium is running.

Setup Cron Jobs

Cron can be run as the standard user and therefore does not require sudo to run.

The format for cron is m h dom mon dow command

m = minute
h = hour
dom = day of month
mon = month
dow = day of week
  Sunday = 0 & 7
  Monday = 1
  Tuesday = 2
  Wednesday = 3
  Thursday = 4
  Friday = 5
  Saturday = 6

crontab -e

Insert the following code block and adjust time and days to match that of your desired schedule.

# This command will turn the display on without affecting dpms
45 6 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/vcgencmd display_power 1

# This command will turn the display off without affecting dpms
15 17 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/vcgencmd display_power 0

sudo service cron restart

Extras

These are not necessary, but can be useful when managing multiple devices over ssh.

Neofetch

Guide

Neofetch is used to show current usages of the Pi itself.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install neofetch

To execute run the command neofetch.

Change the Neofetch config which is located in the ~/.config/neofetch/config.conf to match this configuration. If you can’t find these files, press Ctrl + h.

info title
info underline

info "OS" distro
info "Host" model
info "Local IP" local_ip
info "Kernel" kernel
info "Uptime" uptime
info "Packages" packages
info "Shell" shell
info "Resolution" resolution
info "CPU" cpu
info "CPU Usage" cpu_usage
info "GPU" gpu
info "Disk" disk
info "Memory" memory

# info "GPU Driver" gpu_driver  # Linux only
# info "DE" de
# info "WM" wm
# info "WM Theme" wm_theme
# info "Theme" theme
# info "Icons" icons
# info "Terminal" term
# info "Terminal Font" term_font
# info "Battery" battery
# info "Font" font
# info "Song" song
# info "Public IP" public_ip
# info "Users" users
# info "Install Date" install_date
# info "Locale" locale  # This only works on glibc systems.

To run as soon as an ssh session is initiated insert this at the bottom of the /etc/bash.bashrc file.

if [[ -n $SSH_CONNECTION ]] ; then
    neofetch
fi

Conclusion

When you are finished configuring your device all that will be left to do is give it a simple reboot.

sudo reboot