Remote SSH for a fleet of Raspberry Pis

Your Pis sit on networks you do not control. Each one dials out to the relay, and you open a shell from the browser.

Which Pis

• Pi Zero, Zero W and Pi 1: the armv6 build.
• Pi 2, or a 32-bit OS on later models: the armv7 build.
• A 64-bit OS on Pi 3, 4, 5 or Zero 2 W: the arm64 build.

Check first

• The OpenSSH server is on. Raspberry Pi OS ships with SSH off; turn it on in raspi-config. Sessions go to it.
• The installer checks the release signature with OpenSSL 3, which Raspberry Pi OS has from Bookworm on. On older images pass --sha256.
• Read-only root? Point --prefix and --state-dir at a writable mount. The installer cannot write to /etc then, so add the sshd lines and start command it prints to your image.

Many Pis

One device: Add device in the web app and run the install command. A production line: ask for a provisioning credential. See the docs.

One open shell per device at a time.

Price

€0.10 a device a month, billed yearly, at least €6 a year. 100 Pis is €10 a month.

Pick something else if

You need to push containers and OS updates to the fleet. That is balena's job, see RescueShell vs balena.