Moving a Raspberry Pi Offsite: Everything That Went Wrong
The Plan Move pi-burg, my Raspberry Pi 3 running restic as an offsite backup target, from my house to my mom’s. Simple, right? It already had Tailscale, so once it was on her wifi it would just appear on the tailnet from wherever. Total estimated time: 15 minutes. Total actual time: ~6 hours. The Stack Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite 8TB USB drive with an existing restic repository Tailscale for tailnet connectivity (no static IPs, no port forwarding) A long drive to mom’s house What Was Supposed to Happen Configure wifi on the Pi for mom’s network before leaving home Drive to mom’s Plug in power, let Tailscale come up Profit What Actually Happened Chapter 1: Cloud-init Is a Liar The Pi was already provisioned, so I edited /boot/firmware/network-config from my Mac to add mom’s wifi. I even recomputed the WPA PSK hash because the stored one was for a different SSID. Saved, ejected, booted. ...