How to set a different static IP on many Pis simultaneously

Question

I'm trying to set up a bunch of Pis together on a subnet. Each Pi should have its own unique static IP address. This all well and good for 1 or 2 Pis, but I have a LOT of them.

Currently, I attach all the Micro SD cards for each Pi into many interconnected USB hubs, where I will simultaneously transfer over Raspbian to all the Pis at once.

The issue I'm running into is how do I set a different static IP on each of those Pis without having to boot each one up one by one and go and manually enter it.

One thought I had would be to use a Python script to edit the /boot partition of the SD card for each Pi - and make each Pi auto-run a script to edit their static IPs on first boot (and make themself auto-reboot following that). However, I can't seem to find a way to auto-run a script from the /boot partition. I'm also open to any other creative suggestions :).

EDIT: Ideally I want to be able to make changes to the SD card from my Mac, so it must be within the /boot partition since Macs can't read/write to ext4 file systems without paying for software to do

Answer 1

Haven't read the discussion on the chat complete (to much for scanning) but I suppose you create a master image and copy it over to your RasPis. you say:

Ideally I want to be able to make changes to the SD card from my Mac, so it must be within the /boot partition since Macs can't read/write to ext4 file systems without paying for software to do

I also suppose you setup the static ip address in dhcpcd.conf. Then on your master image you can easily move dhcpcd.conf to the boot partition and symlink to it:

rpi ~$ sudo mv /etc/dhcpcd.conf /boot/
rpi ~$ sudo ln -s /boot/dhcpcd.conf /etc/dhcpcd.conf

Now you can modify it on the /boot partition from your Mac and Raspbian will see it in /etc/dhcpcd.conf.

Answer 2

You can create a loop back device from the official image and mount the rootfs into your system where you can edit whatever files. use kpartx -a to get two loop back devices in /dev/mapper/ dir and then mount the second one which refers to rootfs.