I intend to leave the Pi 3 Plus running with no display attached, will this damage the board?
I just built my first PI and am running Pi Hole. I intend to leave it running all of the time with no display attached.
I have attached heat sinks to the two main chips and they get a little warm but not hot. I have given the board half inch legs to allow for improved air circulation.
My concern is that having no display attached may damage the output chips on the board.
Am I nuts or will the board run indefinitely without a monitor?
I, in fact, have never attached a monitor to any of my Pi boards (don't even own an HDMI capable monitor). The oldest one is running since almost 5 years non-stop and seems to be willing to run some more years.
Before, the SSH daemon was enabled default with fresh Raspbian install so you could lookup the IP assigned to Pi in the router DHCP and connect through SSH.
Cant remember when exactly (I believe with Stretch) but they disabled sshd for security reasons and now you need to enable sshd manually first.
But enabling sshd can still be done headless (checkout point 3):
EDIT: Aha, the article mentions:
As of the November 2016 release, Raspbian has the SSH server disabled by default.
When setting up the Raspberry I used a VGA to HDMI adapter to plug in a VGA monitor, You will need to do this anytime you rebuild the Raspberry, which I have had to do once in the two months I have had it.
When I went back and plugged the VGA adapter in the Raspberry showed no signs of any problem with the monitor. The output looked clear and clean.
Once you enable SSH you can use any client to gain access to the Raspberry. You can also use the web interface, I think without SSH, but I am not completely sure.
Bottom line is, for me, I need to have a monitor plugged in during installation. After that the web interface and SSH work great.