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Is there a way to update multiple Raspberry Pi machines at the same time? Would it be possible to update them from a single copy of the image on the central Ubuntu PC server so that the download takes place only once?

The amount of Pis is 40.

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    can you connect with ethernet/wifi? then just script an ssh call to each, ssh [email protected] command
    – rob
    Nov 13, 2014 at 8:24

5 Answers 5

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You might want to look at Andrew Mulholland's work on Raspi-LTSP which uses a centralised controller for multiple Pis. It essentially uses the Pi as clients to connect to the central 'server' which can be a laptop or desktop machine. http://pi.gbaman.info/?p=256

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Since the Pi boots from an SD card, you need either to update 40 cards using 'dd' to copy an image from your Ubuntu server, or use a bootable image like http://elinux.org/RPi_U-Boot that will pull the rest of the configuration from a TFTP server.

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Don't mean to revive a dead question, but I've been using Ansible to great effect. You can take a look at https://github.com/heisters/node-omxplayer-sync-devops to see how I'm approaching it. It's nice because it just uses SSH, and doesn't require a client install on the pis.

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  • How does it address the requirement of a single download?
    – techraf
    Oct 11, 2015 at 22:30
  • The single download requirement is a little unclear to me. However, if there's a specific file you only want to download once, you can download it to the local machine and then copy it to the clients. I used to do something similar for installing the latest omxplayer: github.com/heisters/node-omxplayer-sync-devops/blob/master/…
    – Ian
    Oct 12, 2015 at 16:54
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I would suggest to do as they do in most companies to manage a large amount of machines / a cluster / ... and use Puppet/Chef

Here is an article on how to install it.

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  • This is pretty similar to something like Ansible. Just for context rather than criticism, the reason I went with Ansible over Puppet or Chef is that it's a lot easier to get running on both the clients and the server. On the clients, the only dependency is SSH. I think you may sacrifice some speed and/or features for that ease of install, so Ansible may not be right in all situations.
    – Ian
    Oct 12, 2015 at 16:58
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You can use a dedicated over-the-air software updater to get safety (rollback in case of any failure) as well as control (deploy to groups, get status & logs, etc). Mender supports Raspbian updates: https://hub.mender.io/t/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-b-raspbian

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