Reasons for Raspberry Pi not responding to network ping?

Question

I was trying to setup my new Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B). I do have a wireless mouse and monitor but no keyboard so I decided to go for a headless-ish setup. Here's what I did:

1. I installed the latest version of NOOBS on my SD card and inserted into the Pi.
2. I connected my Pi to the monitor and powered it up.
3. I clicked through the installation steps to install Raspbian on the Pi. That went smooth and I could see Raspbian setup on the Pi pretty soon.
4. I powered down the Pi ("shutdown" from Menu) and disconnected it from my monitor. I then connected it to my router with an ethernet cable and powered it up again. (the monitor I use is a TV which is setup in a different room than the router so I can't connect them at the same time without significant effort).
5. Next I did arp -a to determine Raspberry's IP address which worked fine. (192.168.1.40)
6. Then I tried to ssh into the address I discovered: ssh [email protected], which failed with a Connection Timed Out error.
7. Trying to ping the IP gives me:

Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3
ping: sendto: No route to host
Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
ping: sendto: Host is down

Is there any way for me to fix this problem without having to go buy a keyboard? I searched around a lot and all solutions involve poking the network from the Pi command line.

I'm attempting to ping my Pi from my Macbook. I've disabled Firewall on my Macbook.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I don't think using arp this way is definitive. You are just looking at a cache on the Mac. A better tool in this context would be nmap.

If that address doesn't respond to pings and you haven't done something unusual to the pi, it is not the pi's address and probably doesn't really belong to anything, hence you get a time out. If it were the pi and ssh simply weren't running, you would get an immediate "Connection refused".

Put another way, your assertion that the pi is not responding to pings is based on a leap of faith that it is connected to the network and you have the correct address for it. At least one of those assumptions is false.

You should try the keyboard and monitor with the pi connected to the router so you can check directly whether it is getting an address properly. If you configured it to use a static address it will not work unless you also assign that on the router.

You should log into your router and see what devices it says are currently part of the network and what addresses they have.

Answer 2

tl;dr: Use a different ip address

I know this is an old question but goldilocks answer above recently helped me. It's quite long so I want to extract the part that helped me:

If you configured it to use a static address it will not work unless you also assign that on the router.

So for me, the solution was to simply use a different ip address. I had copied/pasted the code from some tutorial and didn't update the ip address from their example so the one I was trying to use wasn't assigned on the router.