I have been planning to set up a SMS Gateway for sending and receiving SMS messages via a headless utility unit (Raspberry Pi) for a while. Since I had a leftover Sierra Wireless AirCard 880U from Telstra in Australia I wanted to re-purpose this unit with a spare SIM card. Unfortunately it was very hard to find any good setup manual for this particular combination and took some time to fiddle & debug. This is the working setup for future reference and hopefully it helps somebody.

The Raspbian Install process is fairly well documented using the Raspbian Installer. This is just to document common tasks after the stock install.

Install base utils

apt-get install sudo vim ntpdate git-core binutils make gcc ca-certificates rpi-update

Allow non-root user account access to ‘sudo’

adduser USERNAME sudo
For those Ubuntu users there is no ‘admin’ group in Raspbian (Debian Wheezy).

NTP time update

sudo rm /etc/localtime<br></br>sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide /etc/localtime<br></br>sudo ntpdate -u au.pool.ntp.org