Running first Atlas Linux Box under Windows
Posted in automation on April 25, 2017 by Adrian Wyssmann ‐ 3 min read
Vagrant is a cool tool to easily provide virtual machines and it works perfectly fine under Linux. But as me at work, you might be in a situation where you have or want to run vagrant on a Windows machine. This is per-se not more complicated as under Linux even thought I struggled over some pitfalls.
As already mentioned in a previous post the easiest way to get a working Linux vm is to use the templates for the Atlas Catalog.
> vagrant init ubuntu/yakketa64
...
> varant up
...
Per default the boxes are started headless so you might want to modify the created Vagrantfile and enable gui mode:
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.gui = true
end
Once done, when you launch the box you will see your vm starting up until it provides you the login dialog.
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Now comes the question what is the username and password to be used. Looking at the log messages from vagrant you can see some hints:
> varant up
...
default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2222
default: SSH username: ubuntu
default: SSH auth method: password
...
So username is clear, but password? “ubuntu”? “vagrant”? I’ve tried several but none of them worked:

Searching around lead me to the conclusion that there the password was never revealed to public but user rather shall use ssh-key authentication. Well, the easiest way is obviously the vagrant up command but unfortunately this does not work under Windows as there is no ssh client shipped with it:
> vagrant ssh
`ssh` executable not found in any directories in the %PATH% variable. Is an
SSH client installed? Try installing Cygwin, MinGW or Git, all of which
contain an SSH client. Or use your favorite SSH client with the following
authentication information shown below:
Host: 127.0.0.1
Port: 2222
Username: ubuntu
Private key: D:/vagrant/ubuntu_16.10_x64_atlas/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key
So in order to use Vagrant ssh command you need to have an SSH client installed and the “PATH” environment variable set accordingly. I recommend to use the OpenSSH client which you can install by manually by downloading the installer at http://www.mls-software.com/opensshd.html or you can use a package manager like Chocolatey to achieve the task.
Install ssh client
Upadate environment variable PATH to point to ssh-client binary
set PATH=%PATH%;" C:\Program Files\OpenSSH-Win64\"
Set the
PATH
permanently as described at Stakcoverflow
Finally now I actually can login into the Ubuntu box.
> vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.10 (GNU/Linux 4.8.0-49-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.
New release '17.04' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.
saltstack-archi
Last login: Tue Apr 25 12:20:23 2017 from 10.0.2.2
ubuntu@ubuntu-yakkety:~$