The Raspberry Pi is a great little device. I use one to play my music as my CD player died a death a while back – the CDs kept slipping – and spares are very hard to come by as my “stack” is over 30 years old, but still sounds great. I have ripped my CDs, or most of them, to FLAC format, and have some of them stored on a couple of larger sized USB thumb drives attached to a Raspberry Pi. The Pi has a HiFiBerry DAC Plus attached – which I was lucky enough to win in a MagPi Magazine giveaway – so the sound is excellent played through my Sony “stack”.

I recently had to update Volumio to version 3, and while I’m still happy with it, I do now have a couple of foibles, and bugs which seemingly were fixed still appear to be not fixed. I couldn’t change the theme, for example, until I logged onto the Raspberry Pi and executed the command touch /data/manifestUI.

As it turned out, changing the theme was a nightmare as there is (now) a transparency applied so that background shows through the text. This is garbage! Especially on the “classic” theme, the one I actually like, but there no longer seems to be an option to select a better background, and to lose the transparency.

Anyway, I also wanted to stream my music via MStream, so I needed to install and enable SSH, so that I could login and install software remotely. This turned out to be interesting as the Pi uses a different name for the SSH daemon, it’s ssh rather than sshd which is on every other Linux installation that I know of! Also, because of how the Volumio installation takes over the Pi, I was unable to install nodejs and npm which are requirements of MStream. Bummer! I still needed remote access to the Volumio server though.

To install the SSH server, if not already installed:

1
2
3

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install openssh-server

If it needs to be installed, it will be, otherwise you will be told that it’s already there. Handy.

Once installed, you need to start it:

1

sudo systemctl start ssh    ### Beware, 'SSH' not 'SSHD'!

Test it by logging into your Pi from a different system. If its ok, then enable it to automatically start at boot time:

1

sudo systemctl enable ssh

Job done. After a reboot – to test the automatic starting of the server – you should be able to login.

If necessary, generate a new key file with:

1

ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -b 521

This will generate a 521 bit ECDSA key pair. These days, the DSA key type is best ignored and RSA is probably going to be broken at some point soon.

The key files, for there are two, generated will be in your $HOME/.ssh directory:

1
2
3
4
5
6

ls ~/.ssh/id*

...
/home/norman/.ssh/id_ecdsa
/home/norman/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub
...

The new key file can be copied to the server now:

1

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa volumio@wvolumio

Obviously, substituting your key file name and logon details, you will be prompted for a password at this stage. Once copied over, test that it worked:

1

ssh volumio@wvolumio

And this time, if all was well, you will get logged straight in without needing a password.