VyOS Networks Blog

Building an open source network OS for the people, together.

New images and git digest #3

Daniil Baturin
Posted 4 Nov, 2013

New images: i386, amd64. I think “vyos-$branch-$arch-$flavor-YYYYMMDD.iso” will be the standard naming for dev builds, unless anyone has better ideas.

The changes include:

  • Password reset works correctly now, it has “vyatta” user hardcoded (thanks to Tom Martinson for pointing that out and proposing a fix).
  • Floppy support is removed.
  • There’s now a kernel command line option to select boot config file. Go to GRUB menu, edit the entry and add “vyos-cfg=/path/to/config”, e.g. “vyos-config=/opt/vyatta/etc/config.boot.default” to load the factory config. See vyos.net/wiki/Boot_options for details.
  • Cleaned up some special cases needed for XORP.
  • Image build can be correctly switched between development and release modes. Before that you’d have to manually remove livecd/version after release build to get development build to select version as expected.
  • Some comments on the decisions.

    Regarding the floppy, I haven’t seen it used in years, and modern hardware is very unlikely to have a floppy drive at all anyway. Also, given /config now holds all the volatile data including URL filtering rules and commit archive, a floppy is simply not enough for many setups. And, of course, given how unreliable floppies are, using a floppy for important data is a bad idea.

    Later we will add support for /config on separate drive, as in general there are valid use cases for it. E.g. on semi-unattended routers with no IT personnel around it would be handy to make the config line-replaceable, so if something goes wrong (e.g. the router box dies) end users can be instructed to just swap USB sticks.

    The post categories:

    Comments