Running agents on Raspberry Pi 5¶

Sipfront provides docker images for linux/arm64, so the Sipfront agent can be started on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 (Raspi in short) with docker enabled using the usual docker run ... command.

Important

Raspberry Pis run on SD cards, which are prone to wear & tear. If you plan to run the agents on Raspis for an extended amount of time, or if the Raspis are expected to be unplugged and replugged at any time, you risk to corrupt the SD card, or that the agents on your Raspis are not properly starting.

You are therefore highly advised to use the optimized Sipfront Raspi image as documented below.

Tip

It is highly advised to run the Sipfront agent on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM!

The Sipfront Raspi image¶

Sipfront provides an optimized image for Raspberry Pi 5 8GB variant. This image is based on the official Raspberry Pi OS image, and is optimized for:

easily configuring the Sipfront agent pool during flashing of the SD cards without logging into the Raspi
automatically starting the Sipfront agent on boot using the latest Sipfront agent docker image
running the system on a read-only file system to prevent SD card corruption

Flashing the Sipfront Raspi image to an SD card¶

Download the image¶

You can find the latest Sipfront Raspi image here.

wget https://sipfront-cdn-prod.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/sipfront-agent-rpi5-latest.img

Flash the image¶

We highly advise to use Balena Etcher to flash the image to your SD card. It is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Tip

The Sipfront Raspi image is about 4.2GB in size, so make sure to use an SD card with 8GB of space.

It does not have to be any larger, because nothing (except for a daily timeserver state file update) will be written to the SD card. Everything else is volatile, will be written to a RAM disk and will be reset on reboot.

Select the image from file.¶

Select target SD card¶

Flash image to SD card¶

Wait for the flashing and verification to finish, then proceed to the configuration step.

Configure the agent pool on the SD card¶

Once the flashing is completed, you can configure the agent pool on the SD card without logging into the Raspi.

Locate the sipfront.txt config file¶

Check if the SD card is mounted. On MacOS, it will be mounted automatically, on Windows or Linux you might need to re-seat the SD card into the reader of your computer where you just flashed the card. The bootfs Volume will be mounted, where you can find the agent config file sipfront.txt

Locate the config file — Locate sipfront.txt config file

Edit the config file¶

Open the sipfront.txt file in a text editor and configure the agent pool using the information from your Agentpool Section, e.g.:

AGENT_POOL_ID="12345678-abcd-9876-ffff-123456789abc"
AGENT_POOL_SECRET="MySecretString"
AGENT_POOL_GROUP="my-vip-customer"

The AGENT_POOL_GROUP can be named individually, e.g. the name of the location you put the Raspi in, or the customer name where the Raspi is being placed.

Save the file and eject the SD card¶

Run the Raspi¶

Insert the SD card into the Raspi, connect the Raspi to power and network, and wait for the Raspi to boot up. It will take a couple of minutes for the agent to boot, pull the sipfront/agent:latest image and run it. Once it's up, it will show up as pool group in the Agentpool Section. This process is completely automated, so you don't have to do any manual steps. You could re-pack the Raspi with the inserted SD card and ship it to your customer, asking to plug it into their network.
If you really need to log in, you can SSH into the device with the user sipfront and the default password Sipfront!. Once logged in, switch the Raspi to read/write-mode by issuing the command rw, then change the password via the command passwd. Switch back to readonly-mode using the command ro.
You can use sudo -s to switch to root at any time.