First you have the Banana Pi naturally get its operating system.
Since the Banana Pi be used as server, I have decided for the distribution Bananian. An absolute lightweight distribution based on Debian Wheezy, which is designed for low resource usage, security and speed. No graphical user interface, no frills, just the pure operating system. Perfect for a server!
If your Raspberry or Beaglebone is attached to your network and is doing some Jobs for you, it is important that it is always accessible with the same IP-Address.
In most cases the Network-Router, which is the DHCP-Server as well, will try to give every Computer connected to your Network always the same dynamic IP-Address, but this is not for sure.
By default the Raspberry / Beaglebone is set up to search for a DHCP-Server and to receive a dynamic IP-Address, but it is also possible to give your machine a static IP-Address.