Getting started#
Download the image, check it, write it to a stick, boot it, answer the installer, sign in. Allow about twenty minutes for the install itself, most of it spent copying a squashfs to the disk. The pages below describe the keyboard-and-screen path; the unattended path supplies the same answers from a file.
In this order#
| Page | What it assumes | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What Wheelhouse is | Nothing. |
| 2 | What you need | You are choosing or borrowing a machine. |
| 3 | Download and verify | You have a network and about 600 MB to spare. |
| 4 | Write the stick | You have the ISO and a USB stick you can erase. |
| 5 | Boot it | The stick is written and the machine will boot from it. |
| 6 | Every installer question | You are looking at the welcome screen. |
| 7 | What the installer does | You pressed Install. |
| 8 | First sign-in | The machine has rebooted into the installed system. |
| 9 | Enter a licence | You are signed in and want to change something. |
| 10 | The first hour | The router works. |
The other ways in#
- Installing in a VM — evaluating the product without hardware.
- Boxes with one port — a single-NIC machine installs, and the installer asks a question it does not ask anyone else.
- Serial consoles — on a headless box the installer does not take the console; you run it.
- Installing without a keyboard — hand the machine a seed and it installs itself. This is how you build more than one.
And two that start somewhere other than a blank disk:
- Coming from OPNsense — export, import, read the report, build a seed, install, verify against the router you replaced.
- The developer install — running the agent off-router against an existing VyOS box. It is not the product and it is not supported.
When something stops, If the install goes wrong has the log paths and the failures that occur in practice.
Before you start#
There is no hardware compatibility list. What you need states exactly what has been run and what has not.
An add system image upgrade of a Wheelhouse box is not on record, on hardware or in
a virtual machine.
Where this fits#
Wheelhouse is built on VyOS, which is GPL-licensed, on a Debian base. The kernel, nftables, FRR, Kea and the container runtime are VyOS'; Wheelhouse adds the agent, the web UI and the installer described in this section. About Wheelhouse covers the attribution, the licence boundary and how to get the corresponding source.
See also#
- How Wheelhouse works — the configuration tree, pending changes, the Commit Bar, auto-revert, revisions.
- The manual — a page per screen.
- Task guides — backup, restore, upgrade, SSH, lockout recovery.
- Reference — flags, endpoints, status codes, metrics.
- What is not finished — the current status of the product.
- The product site — the case for it, and what it costs.
- Downloads — images, checksums and the corresponding-source record.