VyOS From Scratch – Edition 1 (set up your own router)

Might be worth adding a paragraph about what VyOS is, maybe not for the target audience but certainly for HN.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vyos.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vyos.io&#x2F;</a><p>The VyOS website says:<p>&gt; Democratizing how we access networks through a universal Router and Open source software.<p>&gt; Our vision at VyOS is to dramatically change how we access networks so that we can all build the solutions we always dreamed of, without restrictions, limitations, or prohibitive costs.<p>But I&#x27;m still kind of none the wiser. Does this thing use Linux or something else?

There&#x27;s incorrect comments in this thread re: VyOS, Vyatta, EdgeOS.<p>Vyatta is the original OS, based on Debian, dating back to 2005. Its history is detailed here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vyatta" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vyatta</a><p>In 2011, Ubiquiti launched their EdgeMax products with EdgeOS which was a fork of Vyatta Core 6.3 ported from x86 to Cavium.<p>In 2012, Vyatta was acquired by Brocade.<p>IN 2013, Vyatta Core 6.6 was forked as VyOS.<p>That&#x27;s the rough origin of these three OSes.<p>I used Vyatta Core on a PC at a startup from 2009-2013 as our office router. I haven&#x27;t paid attention to it or VyOS since then.<p>I&#x27;ve been running various EdgeOS routers at my home since 2014 or so, first an EdgeRouter Lite and today an EdgeRouter 4.<p>EdgeOS has been updated quite a bit over the years from its Vyatta Core origins, but the original developers are no longer with Ubiquiti. EdgeOS hasn&#x27;t seen updates in quite some time now.<p>Also, not all Ubiquiti run EdgeOS. Only the EdgeRouters do. The rest of their products run a completely different OS, generally either UbiquitiOS or UnifiOS.<p>Sources besides my own memory:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.vyos.io&#x2F;versions-mystery-revealed" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.vyos.io&#x2F;versions-mystery-revealed</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Ubiquiti&#x2F;comments&#x2F;scqlg3&#x2F;what_happened_to_edgeos&#x2F;hucrwxx&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Ubiquiti&#x2F;comments&#x2F;scqlg3&#x2F;what_happe...</a>

I was pretty confused what it is too and then I loved it.<p>It&#x27;s debian plus some shell trickery and CLI tools that let you configure debian and debian packages as a router from one large config tree using neat CLI tools (that support commit&#x2F;rollback).<p>Normally you&#x27;d need iptables, a separate DNS package, DHCP server, etc etc to set up a router, with VyOS you just change VyOS config and it configures normal debian packages for you.<p>Plus everything is exhaustively tested and configs are reverse compatible, hiding all breaking changes underneath.<p>It&#x27;s super neat and it works perfectly on a £100 fanless Celeron J4125 box from Aliexpress as a home router, routing and shaping 1gbit without breaking a sweat and with deeply sub-ms delay.

VyOS is unfortunately completely useless for larger applications, since it&#x27;s difficult to impossible to automate due to it&#x27;s unique way of applying configurations. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, for manual administration it&#x27;s great, there&#x27;s a lot of missed automation potential given that it&#x27;s just Linux underneath.<p>As an example, the Ansible modules for VyOS are basicially just variations of an adapted ansible.builtin.shell, instead of offering to manage state in a more first class manner (via attributes and values):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.ansible.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;latest&#x2F;collections&#x2F;vyos&#x2F;vyos&#x2F;vyos_config_module.html#ansible-collections-vyos-vyos-vyos-config-module" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.ansible.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;latest&#x2F;collections&#x2F;vyos&#x2F;vyo...</a>

The theory of what VyOS does is (per my understanding) really simple: Configure all the networking components of a Linux system from a single place.<p>Why isn&#x27;t doing this much more popular? All the systems are already there, after all! Why aren&#x27;t there (that I know of) dozens of projects to accomplish this relatively easy, but relatively useful task?<p>I think it&#x27;s a pretty big deal to be able to configure that stuff from a single place. Commercial router manufacturers all do it. Why does (as far as I know) only VyOS do it on the open source side of things?

The question &#x27;what is this thing&#x27; is probably best answered by the Github project page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vyos">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vyos</a><p>It&#x27;s a decent-ish option if you need advanced routing functionality; one thing to keep in mind, though, is that unless you&#x27;re OK with running unstable &#x27;nightly&#x27; code, you&#x27;ll be spending USD 8K+ on an annual basis.

A definite tangent: About three house moves ago I had OpenWRT on a cable router and knew what was going on. But with family and work and house moves I am now just staring at a flashing BT Home Hub and wondering how to tackle the inevitable &quot;of course that router firmware wont allow that and your ISP wont give out its password and ...&quot;<p>Is there a uptodate reliable guide (possibly including how to persuade your wife it&#x27;s a good idea to drill holes in the living room ceiling to run cat6)

I like the idea of VyOS. Networking software tends to have so much hidden, hard to control state for reasons I don&#x27;t understand. As a programmer this melts my brain.<p>VyOS finally lets you have all your configuration in one, easily controlled place. Nice!<p>For some reason I ended not actually trying it out too actively. I think I was weirded out by the distribution model and concerned by the small community.

The idea of VyOS is awesome: have your configuration all in one place, apply it atomically.<p>After using it for several years, the implementation is clearly lacking. It seems that the maintainers are overloaded, because contributions to fix minor issues, or add config options get ignored in my experience. As a result, the configuration is missing some nice options in the IPv6 space (so-called tethering), and it&#x27;s still using iptables for packet filtering. It&#x27;s also rather hard to roll your own, with your own modules: the module system is rather hard to use.<p>Not to mention the lack of interest to roll out a version for ARM.<p>My next router will be based on NixOS, and will attempt to recreate the awesome UI of VyOS.

Unfortunately they went full &quot;Vyatta way&quot; or &quot;RedHat Way&quot; by basically giving rolling release for free only. I remember times when Vyatta went behind paywalls Vyos was completely free.<p>Not sure who would want something rolling on device like router.<p>Nowdays everyone wanting something good and free go OpnSense way.

hey... I know this post....<p>I need to write a follow-up so bad.<p>VyOS has evolved a BUNCH since I wrote this, but the same basic ideas apply. Mostly some configuration nodes have moved around.

I thought this would be about building VyOS from source, but fun article nonetheless.<p>I use VyOS whenever I need layer 3 routing in vSphere for test environments. NSX-T is (way) faster by dint of being deeply integrated into VMkernel, but VyOS is pretty performant for what it is and is easier to install to boot.

I was wondering if this was Vyatta... it seems it is the community continuation after Broccade ceased development. Used to run this over a decade ago on a &#x27;router&#x27; (ThinkCentre Tiny), but eventually went to a Fedora installation a few years back. Might have a look again.

From my experience, Nix makes lot more reliable and easier to configure router. ymmv