Bpi user account on Debian build

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4/BPI-R4 Pro(MT7988)
1

Hi, I’m booting off an SD Card image of your Debian build. In addition to the root account, I noticed there’s also an account with the name bpi. I tried logging in but don’t know the password (tried “” and banapi and neither worked). There is no pi account. What’s the purpose of the bpi account? What’s the default password? Any harm if I delete it?

Can you confirm there are no other login-able accounts on the default image? (I’m trying to lock down this box a little bit).

Finally, is it possible to move Debian from the SD Card to the eMMC, without building my own image? All the instructions I found so far require a build step on a Linux box (which I don’t have convenient right now). I tried writing the Debian .img file to the mmc but I think I also need to write BL2. I have a BL2 file I found but need some help with getting it loaded properly (first step mmc dev 0 at [bpi-r4] Debian or Ubuntu on emmc doesn’t work as the mmc command isn’t available when I boot off OpenWRT/NAND).

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Which debian image do you use? My image has only the root account with password bananapi as i create no additional account to let user choose name of his user.

But it is highly recommended to create a user account and not work with root. You can look in /etc/passwd for existing users. Id above 1000 are normally non-system users.

Yes you can flash sd image to emmc and flash+enable bl2 on boot0.

3

Hi Frank, thanks for responding so quickly. The image I installed is:

2024-07-18-debian-12-bookworm-bpi-r4-5.4-sd-emmc.img.zip

from this page: Banana Pi BPI-R4 | BananaPi Docs

I believe it came from this direct Google drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AJJ4fg-Q8jR5XmVomVdYV8bPOth4BzJf/view?usp=sharing

Below is the /etc/passwd I see out of the box, bpi is fourth from the bottom. Was this an accidental inclusion? Note I manually deactivated it as I don’t want rogue user accounts (to be honest I was already a bit wary downloading Debian from a google drive link).

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/usr/sbin/nologin
bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/usr/sbin/nologin
sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev:/usr/sbin/nologin
sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/usr/sbin/nologin
man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man:/usr/sbin/nologin
lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:/usr/sbin/nologin
mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail:/usr/sbin/nologin
news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/usr/sbin/nologin
uucp:x:10:10:uucp:/var/spool/uucp:/usr/sbin/nologin
proxy:x:13:13:proxy:/bin:/usr/sbin/nologin
www-data:x:33:33:www-data:/var/www:/usr/sbin/nologin
backup:x:34:34:backup:/var/backups:/usr/sbin/nologin
list:x:38:38:Mailing List Manager:/var/list:/usr/sbin/nologin
irc:x:39:39:ircd:/run/ircd:/usr/sbin/nologin
_apt:x:42:65534::/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
systemd-network:x:998:998:systemd Network Management:/:/usr/sbin/nologin
sshd:x:100:65534::/run/sshd:/usr/sbin/nologin
messagebus:x:101:108::/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
systemd-resolve:x:997:997:systemd Resolver:/:/usr/sbin/nologin
bpi:x:1000:1001::/home/bpi:/bin/bash
dnsmasq:x:102:65534:dnsmasq,,,:/var/lib/misc:/usr/sbin/nologin
polkitd:x:996:996:polkit:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
iperf3:x:103:109::/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin

Regarding burning Debian to eMMC, could you point me to the right BL2 image to use (for the 4GB model)? On second glance I’m not entirely sure the BL2 file I have in hand right now is the right one.

I’m following the steps here: https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-R4/GettingStarted_BPI-R4#_how_to_burn_image_to_onboard_emmc

I need the file I should write to /dev/mmcblk0boot0

The first time I tried with bl2_emmc.img from OpenWRT MTK MP4.1 wifi SDK wifi driver for BE14000 Wifi Card. I got this at boot:

Card did not respond to voltage select! : -110
mmc_init: -95, time 17
** Bad device specification mmc 0 **
Couldn't find partition mmc 0:5
Can't set block device
## Warning: Input data exceeds 1048576 bytes - truncated
## Info: input data size = 1048578 = 0x100002
## Error: "uenvcmd" not defined

The second time I tried with bl2_emmc-r4.img from the MTK MP4.0 package, and it didn’t even get that far - I got an error BL2: Failed to load image id 3.

Appreciate your help.

4

I also noticed the line Tunnel=he-ipv6 in /etc/systemd/network/25-lanbr.network, and would love to learn more about what that’s for - thanks!

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In my image it is to bring up a IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel…if you do not use it you can disable it. But your passwd looks like you use bpi image as my image does not have bpi user. Maybe they used my image as base and added their changes.