Network Configuration

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Default configuration
  3. Connecting to a Wi-Fi network
  4. Using a static IPv4
  5. Enabling IPv6 support
  6. References

Introduction

Network configuration in BerryOS is handle by cloud-init with the help of netplan inside the /boot/firmware/network-config file.

We decided to use the version 2 networking config format as it is capable of configuring both the eth0 and wlan0 interface on the Raspberry Pi easily thanks to netplan’s ability to configure systemd-networkd renderer.

Default configuration

By default, BerryOS is configured to configure the eth0 interface using DHCP for IPv4 assignation by using the following configuration:

version: 2
ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: true

Connecting to a Wi-Fi network

To connect to a Wi-Fi network, we will need to update our network-config file to include the necessary directive to enable the wlan0 interface.

version: 2
ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: true
wifis:
  wlan0:
    dhcp4: true
    optional: true
    access-points:
      "My Access Point":
        password: "AP Password"

From there you can specify the access point you want to by replacing "My Acess Point" with the SSID of your Wi-Fi network. Be careful, the SSID must be enclosed in quotation marks. You should also replace "AP Password" with the password of your network.

Password do not need to be set in plain text, they can also be set directly as WPA PSK. The PSK form of a password can be generated using the wpa_passphrase utility on any system with wpa_supplicant installed. This would look like this:

version: 2
ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: true
wifis:
  wlan0:
    dhcp4: true
    optional: true
    access-points:
      "My Access Point":
        password: 046ea35be8d6bd70480d233602146ff58aded1c2892d3aa67c5f6be635e8163f

Using a static IPv4

To use a static IPv4 instead of using DHCP for an interface, we need to disable the dhcp4 parameter and add the static network configuration we want using addresses to set up the IP / netmask combo and routes to set up the default route:

version: 2
ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: false
    addresses:
      - 192.168.1.128/24
    routes:
      - to: 0.0.0.0/0
        via: 192.168.1.1

Enabling IPv6 support

In order to enable IPv6 support via DHCP for an interface, the dhcp6 parameter of said interface should be added and set to true. For example, to enable it for the eth0 interface, your configuration should look like:

version: 2
ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: true
    dhcp6: true

Manual configuration can also be done by using the addresses & routes parameters:

version: 2
ethernets:
  eth0:
    dhcp4: false
    dhcp6: false
    addresses:
      - 192.168.1.128/24
      - 2001:cafe:face:beef::dead:dead/64
    routes:
      - to: 0.0.0.0/0
        via: 192.168.1.1
      - to: ::/0
        via: 2001:cafe:face::1

References

Note

The netplan documentation shows that a default route can be configured with the default alias as the to target in routes. This does not work on BerryOS as it is not currently supported by the networkd renderer, you must use the 0.0.0.0/0 or ::/0 form instead.