Add Color to Proxmox Logon

Do you want to rice the logon screen of Proxmox? This is easy, just edit one file. This is how I set up the PVE nodes for easy trouble shooting. The idea is to show clearly the login as IP and FQDN and also all the colors and positions of the patch cables - this is not in stead of tagging cables its on top.

If you need to wisit the rack in a data senter you need to act fast. The error is usually a bad one and it has already been on for some time. To help in this we use color coded patch cables: iLo are Blue, MGMT are red VLAns are Green. For PVE we use Corosync on Purple and Migration on Yellow.

Table of Contents

How to make the Debian logon banner
Using figlet writing in bash scripts
Bash with Color
References

How to make the Debian logon banner

If you have changed the IP address of a Proxmox host, or happen to use DHCP for it you will need this. Originally the banner shows the login screen with the IP used at initial setup.

The getty/ agetty program is responsible for displaying the login banner (technically the PRE-login banner) on many distros, including Debian and Ubuntu. Proxmox is based on Debian.

At startup getty reads /etc/issue for the banner text.

In the man getty/agetty, in the ISSUE FILES section, we see that getty supports escape codes for displaying system data. We are interested in using \4 or \4{interface} \n the hostname and \O the domain name.

By default, Proxmox creates a bridge (vmbr0), and connects a NIC to it. You can check this by running ip a and seeing what interfaces and addresses your system has. Note what bridge has the address you want to show.

All we need to do is replace the hard coded ip with \4{interface}, {vmbr0} by default on a Proxmox node. The /etc/issue file is just plain text, and gets created for you when installing Proxmox.

Here is an example of the default file with the 192.0.2.49 ip address.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to the Proxmox Virtual Environment. Please use your web browser to
configure this server - connect to:

  https://192.0.2.49:8006/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now that's not pretty. Lets create a figlet logo and edit the /etc/issues file.

Adding color and more info

figlet -f thin CasaUrsus

If you do not have figlet installed please install it by apt update && apt install figlet. Avoid fonts with / they do not work well in figlet.

We will now create something like the first picture.

nano /etc/issue

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to the Proxmox Virtual Environment. Please use your web browser to
configure this server - connect to:

  ,---.               .   .
  |    ,---.,---.,---.|   |,---.,---..   .,---.
  |    ,---|`---.,---||   ||    `---.|   |`---.
  `---'`---^`---'`---^`---'`    `---'`---'`---'


  \e{bold}\e{cyan}https://\4{vmbr0}:8006/\e{reset}
  \e{bold}\e{yellow}https://\n.\O:8006/\e{reset}


VLAN  Switch/port   -  panel/jack  - cable to NIC
MGMT LAN  \e{red}   2/01  <===>  4/01   \e{reset}\e{white}<===>  enp5s0\e{reset}
VM LAN    \e{green}   2/02  <===>  4/02   \e{reset}\e{red}<===>  enp9s0\e{reset}
CoroSync  \e{bold}\e{magenta}   1/31  <===>  1/03   \e{reset}\e{magenta}<===>  enp14s0\e{reset}
Migration \e{bold}\e{yellow}   1/41  <===>  1/04   \e{reset}\e{yellow}<===>  enp14s0\e{reset}

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

e or e{name}
Translate the human-readable name to an escape sequence and insert it (for example: \e{red}Alert text.\e{reset}). If the name argument is not specified, then insert \033. The supported names are: black, blink, blue, bold, brown, cyan, darkgray, gray, green, halfbright, lightblue lightcyan, lightgray, lightgreen, lightmagenta, lightred, magenta, red, reset, reverse, yellow and white. All unknown names are silently ignored.

Documentation Address Blocks
The blocks 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2) and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3) are provided for use in documentation.

Using figlet writing in bash scripts

If you don't have it installed just install and add some fonts

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright (c) 2023 CasaUrsus
#  ____                _   _
# / ___|__ _ ___  __ _| | | |_ __ ___ _   _ ___
#| |   / _` / __|/ _` | | | | '__/ __| | | / __|
#| |__| (_| \__ \ (_| | |_| | |  \__ \ |_| \__ \
# \____\__,_|___/\__,_|\___/|_|  |___/\__,_|___/
#
# Copyright (c) 2023 CasaUrsus
# Author: NalleJ
# License: MIT
# https://github.com/nallej/raw/main/LICENSE

## Functions ===================================================

function header 
{
  cat <<"EOF"
    ____                _   _
   / ___|__ _ ___  __ _| | | |_ __ ___ _   _ ___
  | |   / _` / __|/ _` | | | | '__/ __| | | / __|
  | |__| (_| \__ \ (_| | |_| | |  \__ \ |_| \__ \
   \____\__,_|___/\__,_|\___/|_|  |___/\__,_|___/

EOF
}

See the part 2 - use pvebanner

Bash with Color

You can make your BASH script better, by colorizing it's output. Use ANSI escape codes to set text properties like foreground and background colors.
This is a walk down memory lane back to DOS times when codes had to be frequently used for output to terminals, databases and printers.

Use the following template for writing colored text:

echo -e "\e[COLORmSample Text\e[0m"

Use in bash scripts as variables

## Variables ===================================================
YW=$(echo "\e[33m")          # Yellow
BL=$(echo "\e[36m")          # Cyan
RD=$(echo "\e[1;31m")        # Bold Red
GN=$(echo "\e[1;92m")        # Bold Brite Light Green
PE=$(echo "\e[1;95m")        # Purple

BGN=$(echo "\e[4;92m")       # Underline Brite Light Green
DGN=$(echo "\e[32m")         # Green
BPE=$(echo "\e[95m")         # Bright Purple
BYW=$(echo "\e[93m")         # Bright Yellow
WGN=$(echo "\e[1;37;1;42m")  # Bold White in Light Green Box
WYW=$(echo "\e[1;37;1;43m")  # Bold White in Light Green Box
WRD=$(echo "\e[1;37;1;41m")  # Bold White in Light Red Box

More ANSI - Color Escape Codes (Bright)

History

The original specification only had 8 colors, and just gave them names. The SGR parameters 30–37 selected the foreground color, while 40–47 selected the background. Quite a few terminals implemented "bold" (SGR code 1) as a brighter color rather than a different font, thus providing 8 additional foreground colors. Usually you could not get these as background colors, though sometimes inverse video (SGR code 7) would allow that.

Examples: to get black letters on white background use ESC[30;47m, to get red use ESC[31m, to get bright red use ESC[1;31m. To reset colors to their defaults, use ESC[39;49m (not supported on some terminals), or reset all attributes with ESC[0m. Later terminals added the ability to directly specify the "bright" colors with 90–97 and 100–107.

37/47 is actually called White.
Bright versions are for forground 90-97 and background 100-107
Bright Black is Grey and Bright White is white

Escape sequence also control the manner in which characters are displayed on the screen:

Combining all these escape sequences

By combining all these escape sequences, we can get more fancy effect.

echo -e "\e[COLOR1;COLOR2mSample Text\e[0m"

There are some differences when combining colors with bold text attribute:

See the notes for more info on what you may use

Examples:

References

See agetty man page ^[1] Figlet fonts ^[2] Private Network Addresses ^[3] ANSI escabe codes. Te color will depend on what terminal is used. ^[4] Updates ^[5]