Boot it#
Boot the machine from the stick. Both UEFI and legacy BIOS boot are built into the image,
which carries grub-efi-amd64 and grub-pc. You will see the Wheelhouse splash, a boot
menu with two Wheelhouse entries, a short quiet stretch, a screen saying Wheelhouse is
starting, and then the installer's welcome menu. Nothing on the machine is touched at any
point on this page.
The boot menu#
| Entry | What it does |
|---|---|
| Install or run Wheelhouse | The normal boot. The kernel command line carries quiet, so the unit descriptions the base would otherwise print between the splash and the banner stay off the screen. |
| Install or run Wheelhouse (fail-safe, verbose boot) | The same image without quiet, so every message prints. Boot this when a machine gets stuck and you need to see where. |
Both menus — GRUB's and ISOLINUX' — and the splash behind them are Wheelhouse's own.
quiet raises the console log level to KERN_ERR and tells systemd not to print unit
status. Panics, oopses and units that fail still reach the screen. You can also delete the
word from the command line before booting — Tab in ISOLINUX, e in GRUB.
Secure Boot#
Untested. Assume you have to turn it off. The image contains VyOS' own shim-signed
and grub-efi-amd64-signed, but the build passes no signing key and no key material for
signing a kernel exists in this project, so the chain Secure Boot needs is not completed
here. If the machine refuses to boot the stick, disable Secure Boot in firmware setup and
try again. What you need has the detail.
The starting screen#
Wheelhouse is starting.
Loading the router configuration and the agent (35 s).
The installer opens when they are ready.That screen waits for two things: VyOS to finish loading its configuration, and the agent
to reach active. It counts up in five-second steps and gives up waiting after five
minutes, going on to the menu regardless. On a slow box the whole wait is a couple of
minutes. It is not stuck.
The installer needs the agent because one of the two passwords you are about to choose is set through the agent's own API and verified by signing in with it.
The welcome menu#
Wheelhouse is running from the live image.
Nothing is written to this machine until you confirm the summary.
install Install Wheelhouse to a disk
live Keep running the live system
shell Open a shell| Entry | What it does |
|---|---|
| install | Starts the questions. Every installer question walks through them in order. |
| live | Hands the console back to a normal login prompt. Sign in as vyos / vyos, as the console banner says. End that session and the installer comes back. |
| shell | A root shell on the live system. Type exit to return to this menu. |
At this point nothing has been written to any disk and the live configuration is unchanged. The installer records the first moment that stops being true, and reports it if something later fails — see If the install goes wrong.
Where the installer runs#
On a live boot a systemd generator drops a drop-in on getty@tty1.service so that the
login service on the first video console runs wheelhouse-install --auto instead of a
login prompt. Three consequences:
getty@tty1keeps its restart-forever semantics. Choosing live and then ending the login session brings the installer back.- Serial consoles keep their login prompt. The generator only touches
tty1. On a serial console you log in and run the installer yourself — Serial consoles. - An installed system is untouched. The generator exits immediately unless
/usr/lib/live/mount/medium/live/filesystem.squashfsis present, so a machine booted from its own disk gets the normal login prompt. Runningwheelhouse-installon an installed system refuses and says to useadd system imageinstead.
dialog draws in 80 columns, and every screen and banner in the installer is sized for
that.
The seed check happens before the menu#
On a live boot the installer looks for an unattended-install seed before it draws
anything. If it finds one, the machine installs itself and you never see the welcome
menu. A labelled USB stick, a URL on the kernel command line, or cloud-init's own seed
directory will all be found, and wheelhouse.autoinstall=off on the kernel command line
insists on a person. Installing without a keyboard has where it
looks and how to stop it.
An unattended install runs at most once per boot, so a seed that fails cannot become a loop that keeps erasing a disk.
The console banner#
Above the login prompt, on every boot, the machine prints a banner with the web UI addresses, how to sign in, and — on a live image — how to install. The live version says:
Console: vyos / vyos on the live image; the installer sets yours
Install: on the first console; elsewhere run: sudo wheelhouse-installThe banner is rewritten every 20 seconds, so addresses appear as they arrive. First sign-in covers what it says on the installed system.
See also#
- Every installer question — the next step.
- Serial consoles — if there is no screen on the machine.
- Installing without a keyboard — if there is nobody at it.
- If the install goes wrong — when the boot itself is the problem.
- Working from the console — the console on a router that is already installed.
- The image flavor — what is in the ISO and how it is built.