Having muddled though the process a couple of times now, and installed various tools I'd not used before, here are some notes I wish I'd known earlier.
A bit of a brain-dump as I get things straight in my head.

Startup

If you use the aegir-up process to get virtualbox to launch for you on your own desktop, it will start 'headless' and won't be immediately available though the virtualbox desktop console. Didn't for me anyway.
It was however registered, so after stopping it, I was able to use the Virtualbox console to start it again as normal.

The expected use however is to always use the vagrant tools to stop & start it.

login to shell

Once your box is up, the login details (by default) to ssh in or use the virtualbox console are:

user:vagrant
pass:vagrant

Although, as per usual with aegir, you should immediately switch to or log in as 'aegir' user to do anything.

That's if you want to connect to it using normal ssh. Tools exist to do this better however. I think.
You are expected to use vagrant to manage this for you, as it has prepared some ssh keys for you.

Connect to ssh using vagrant tools

A folder will have been created in your home directory unless you chose otherwise. eg ~/vagrant/projects/aegir-up
To login, the vagrant shortcut is to go

cd ~/vagrant/projects/aegir-up
vagrant ssh

Connect to ssh using drush-vagrant

The drush vagrant extension should support addressing the project by name already I guess. Though I couldn't find further docs over there just yet.

Running 

drush vagrant

Gives you more hints to try.

I was expecting to go 

drush @aegir-up ssh
# or
drush @aegir-up vagrant-shell

from anywhere and drush would know where my project was and how to connect. That didn't work immediately for me.

I seem to be able to address sites inside the new box directly

drush site-alias  @aegir-up.aegir-up1
drush @aegir-up.aegir-up1 status

but it was not clear how to just get to the server itself.

It turns out that 

drush @aegir-up.aegir-up1 vagrant-shell

does work (I was trying drush @aegir-up vagrant-shell and that failed.)
However it is logging me in as 'me' - it made a user account on the new box named after my username on my laptop which was sorta-clever but unexpected.

I lack understanding

Some blind experimentation with, 

drush @aegir-up.aegir-up1 vagrant-aliases
drush @aegir-up.aegir-up1 vagrant-alias-config

didn't get me there either.

I was expecting that there would be an entry for the host machine (with the ssh, remote-user settings prepared) and that's almost in front of me, but I can't see it.

I can't quite get my head around What I'm seeing when I look at 

$ drush site-alias  @aegir-up
$aliases['aegir-up.aegir-up1'] = array (
  'project-path' => '/Users/dan/vagrant/projects/aegir-up',
  'type' => 'vm',
  'vm-name' => 'aegir-up1',
  'fqdn' => 'aegir-up.aegir-up.local',
  'ip' => '192.168.10.10',
  '#file' => '/Users/dan/.drush/aegir-up.aliases.drushrc.php',
);
$aliases['aegir-up.project'] = array (
  'project-path' => '/Users/dan/vagrant/projects/aegir-up',
  'type' => 'project',
  '#file' => '/Users/dan/.drush/aegir-up.aliases.drushrc.php',
);

and

$ drush @aegir-up status
You are about to execute 'status' non-interactively (--yes forced) on all of the following targets:
  @aegir-up.project
  @aegir-up.aegir-up1
Continue?  (y/n):

The system itself (third attempt) is actually working and I can use the aegir Web UI itself. I'm just not sure which layer (virtualbox, vagrant, drush-vagrant, drush-aegir-up, ssh) I should be interacting with when I want to mess around on the server. (to try and dev/test a new feature for hostmaster)

Comments

helmo’s picture

helmo commented

Thanks for sharing.

The whole stack of components used for aegir-up is massive and unfortunately complex.

Maybe the aegir-up readme should point more explicitly to the one from drush-vagrant.. Not that everything is answered there, but drupal-up users would benefit from the same info.

Any patches for the documentation files would be very welcome.

* About your 'Startup' section:
Opend: #1866564: Consider changing the default to Gui = TRUE to make the initial experience more intuitive.

* And
Opend: #1866568: vagrant-shell could default to using the aegir user... would be nice.

dman’s picture

dman commented

Thanks for your time.
Glad you could pull some structure out of my confusion. I posted these notes as I encountered things - as a sort of user test, and because I suspected even I would forget how I got things working in the end if I kept muddling through.

I think isolating the logon user to the expected logon user is a good call #1866568: vagrant-shell could default to using the aegir user... would be nice.

Maybe I do - and it did feel like that - have to step back from aegir-up and play directly with drush vagrant to get comfortable with that first, before adding the aegir-up layer. However the only reason I want to mess with vagrant at all (at the time) is to leverage aegir-up.

The infrastructure rebuild that I'd plotted for our company since Munich has since ended up on VMware instead of Virtualbox, so I probably won't be personally investing much more time into vagrant. The aegir-up system gave me a taster (thanks) for one approach, but my experience here wasn't enough for me to push it as *the* approach to take for our hosting solutions.
I still use virtualbox for laptop dev, just not for distributed or automated boxes now.
What I'm explaining is that I am unlikely to be revisiting these docs in the near future. :-}

lunk rat’s picture

lunk rat commented

The infrastructure rebuild that I'd plotted for our company since Munich has since ended up on VMware instead of Virtualbox, so I probably won't be personally investing much more time into vagrant.

@dman

  1. Vagrant is intended for development environments, not deployment of production hosting. So it's good that you decided not to use it for that purpose
  2. Vagrant now works with VMware http://www.vagrantup.com/vmware