this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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I made a script to remotely reflash a Raspberry Pi (alien.top)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hey fellow self-hosters!

Not directly related to self-hosting, but since it looks like quite a few people here (like me) are using Raspberry PIs to self-host stuff, I thought some people might be interested.

I use my Raspberry Pi as a NAS, and I'm using Ansible to automate the whole setup. After trying some stuff and experimenting a bit, I like to start again with a clean install and run my Ansible playbook to have a clean setup.

But I'm not always home when I do stuff with my Pi and thought it would be useful to have a way to reflash it remotely, so I could continue to break stuff and just reflash it when it gets too messy.

So I made a script to remotely reflash the Raspberry Pi. The main idea is that after flashing the SD card with the Raspi Imager, I make a copy of the bootfs and rootfs partitions, and when I need to reset the Pi to the initial state, I restore both copies of the partitions.

I wrote a step-by-step guide explaining everything:

https://gist.github.com/lilianmallardeau/04368e95bc97eb9738fba13df3bbfe4a

Feel free to use it if you like!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

YESSS.

Thank you! This is exactly what I need. I have a bunch of random boards I am always mucking around with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For your case, you might want to switch to overlay rootfs and mount /boot as read-only, your sd card won't get changed at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Please elaborate how to overlay rootfs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Configure your raspberry pi os properly, then use raspi-config to switch to overlay root filesystem. You can switch back (using raspi-config) if you want to make changes to your os.

See https://learn.adafruit.com/read-only-raspberry-pi/overview

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Nice

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

This is a great idea. Regarding not ending up in an unusable state if your internet connection goes down, you could consider running the flashing steps in a background subshell with nohup or similar. Or double-fork the shell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Great!

It would even be easier to get the DISK_ID directly in the script, at its beginning (but after the check about being root):

DISK_ID=$(sfdisk --disk-id /dev/mmcblk0)