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Connecting the Robot to Your Network

Connect your workstation to the robot as described in Connecting a Workstation and Starting the Robot. If you haven’t connected the robot to your network yet, the robot is still connected to its own network, which is called ubiquityrobot, and your workstation is connected to that. We assume you have ssh’ed into the robot.

Before you go on, you should change the hostname of your robot, to distinguish your robot from others. Open a new terminal window, and log in to the robot with ssh:

ssh ubuntu@ubiquityrobot.local

using the password which is “ubuntu”.

OPTIONAL: In the interests of security, you can change the user password. Just type:

passwd

and follow the prompts.

To change the hostname you can use pifi. Type the command:

sudo pifi set-hostname NEWHOSTNAME

Note: “sudo” is a Linux command that allows administrative actions.
Linux will often ask you for your password (it’s “ubuntu”, if you haven’t changed it) when you use sudo (sudo stands for Super-User DO).

If you now reboot the robot the new hostname will be used

sudo reboot

Now you can log in to the robot with NEWHOSTNAME:

ssh ubuntu@NEWHOSTNAME.local

Use pifi to list the nearby networks:

ubuntu@NEWHOSTNAME:~$ pifi list seen

MyNetwork
Neighbor’s network
Other Network

We want to switch to MyNetwork, and we have now verified that it’s present. So we can command:

ubuntu@NEWHOSTNAME:~$ sudo pifi add MyNetwork password

Now reboot the robot again.

sudo reboot

The robot will reboot and try to attach to the “MyNetwork” wifi network. But your workstation is not connected to “MyNetwork”, because we left it connected to ubiquityrobot. So, on a Linux machine, connect your workstation to “MyNetwork”.

If your workstation is a virtual machine, it accesses the network through its host. So to change its network attachment, you must shut it down, close the virtual machine, change the host network attachment, then start the workstation again.

To test,

$ping NEWHOSTNAME.local

The ping result shows the network address of the robot:

PING NEWHOSTNAME.local (10.0.0.113) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.0.113: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=97.6 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.113: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=5.70 ms

Press control-c to stop the pinging.

If something goes wrong here, the robot may come back up in Access Point mode–that is, on the network named ubiquityrobot. Reboot everything and start over.

Now ssh into the robot.

$ ssh ubuntu@NEWHOSTNAME.local

As before:

The authenticity of host ‘10.0.0.113 (10.0.0.113)’ can’t be established. ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:sDDeGZzL8FPY3kMmvhwjPC9wH+mGsAxJL/dNXpoYnsc. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

yes

Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/somepath/.ssh/known_hosts). ubuntu@10.0.0.113’s password:

ubuntu

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.38-v7+ armv7l)

There is some housekeeping that you can perform at this point, to keep your robot up to date. Begin by checking the date.

ubuntu@NEWHOSTNAME:~$ date

Mon Aug 14 17:16:26 UTC 2017

Now that you have the correct date you can update the robot to get changes that have been made since the robot was manufactured.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

This may take some time, since it may have been a while since the original image was made.

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