Login

The default VyOS user account (vyos), as well as newly created user accounts, have all capabilities to configure the system. All accounts have sudo capabilities and therefore can operate as root on the system. Setting the level to admin is optional, all accounts on the system will have admin privileges.

Both local administered and remote administered RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) accounts are supported.

Local

Create user account jsmith and the password mypassword.

set system login user jsmith full-name "Johan Smith"
set system login user jsmith authentication plaintext-password mypassword

The command:

show system login

will show the contents of system login configuration node:

user jsmith {
    authentication {
        encrypted-password $6$0OQHjuQ8M$AYXVn7jufdfqPrSk4/XXsDBw99JBtNsETkQKDgVLptXogHA2bU9BWlvViOFPBoFxIi.iqjqrvsQdQ./cfiiPT.
        plaintext-password ""
    }
    full-name "Johan Smith"
    level admin
}

SSH with Public Keys

The following command will load the public key dev.pub for user jsmith

loadkey jsmith dev.pub

Note

This requires uploading the dev.pub public key to the VyOS router first. As an alternative you can also load the SSH public key directly from a remote system:

loadkey jsmith scp://[email protected]/home/devuser/.ssh/dev.pub

In addition SSH public keys can be fully added using the CLI. Each key can be given a unique identifier, calypso is used oin the example below to id an SSH key.

set system login user jsmith authentication public-keys callisto key 'AAAAB3Hso...Q=='
set system login user jsmith authentication public-keys callisto type 'ssh-rsa'

RADIUS

VyOS supports using one or more RADIUS servers as backend for user authentication.

The following command sets up two servers for RADIUS authentication, one with a discrete timeout of 5 seconds and a discrete port of 1812 and the other using a default timeout and port.

set system login radius-server 192.168.1.2 secret 's3cr3t0815'
set system login radius-server 192.168.1.2 timeout '5'
set system login radius-server 192.168.1.2 port '1812'
set system login radius-server 192.168.1.3 secret 's3cr3t0816'

This configuration results in:

show system login
 radius-server 192.168.1.2 {
     secret s3cr3t0815
     timeout 5
     port 1812
 }
 radius-server 192.168.1.3 {
     secret s3cr3t0816
 }

Note

If you wan’t to have admin users to authenticate via RADIUS it is essential to sent the Cisco-AV-Pair shell:priv-lvl=15 attribute. Without the attribute you will only get regular, non privilegued, system users.

Source Address

RADIUS servers could be hardened by only allowing certain IP addresses to connect. As of this the source address of each RADIUS query can be configured. If this is not set incoming connections to the RADIUS server will use the nearest interface address pointing towards the RADIUS server - making it error prone on e.g. OSPF networks when a link fails.

set system login radius-source-address 192.168.1.254

Login Banner

You are able to set post-login or pre-login messages with the following lines:

set system login banner pre-login "UNAUTHORIZED USE OF THIS SYSTEM IS PROHIBITED\n"
set system login banner post-login "Welcome to VyOS"

the \n create a newline.