Updated October 18, 2020

Here are some  additonal steps you might want to take at initiation that could save some time down the road. These suggestions may be generally applicable, but I am specifically using a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (beta).

Change the Host Name.

(10/18/2020) Raspberry Pi’s default hostname is “raspberrypi”.  You may want to change the host name to something shorter or more personal, or for security reasons since the default name on the network theoretically would provide details about a potential target.  Changing it early will avoid networking confusion if you decide to change it later, since proxies, servers and your router would all have to get updated to match.  Although raspi-config allows you to change the host name, it has been suggested that this is incomplete.

Follow these steps to update the hostname manually from the CLI:

• Choose a host name.  The host name may be  a text string up to 24 characters using uppercase (A-Z), lowercase (a-z), digits (0-9), minus sign (-), and period (.); the name cannot begin with punctuation and generally its not case sensitive.
• Update the hostname file settings by replacing the “raspberrypi” with the new name.

sudo nano /etc/hostname

• Update the hosts file

sudo nano /etc/hosts

• Reboot.  When your system comes back online, you should be able to find it on the newwork using the new hostname.

Install ExFat Reading ability

(10/18/2020) Windows thumb drives are usually formatted in exFat format, which allows for large sizes and optimized for flash.  It’s not normally readable on linux.  You might at some point choose to insert a exFat drive into your RPi.  To read it, you will need to have extra software on your system.  Install it using the command below.  Click here for more info on mounting exfat drives from the command line:

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils