Installation of 12.04.5 lacks password-less login capability

[Rod Smith]

I've just done a 12.04.5 server install from a Curtinator-created image. It installed fine, and I can login, but I need to give it a password when I do so; it doesn't accept a no-password SSH login, as it should. It's also possible to log in (with a password) at the console, which is not normally possible with a MAAS install. This system lacks a /home/ubuntu/.ssh/ directory, and of course the authorized_keys file that MAAS normally puts there. I don't know what in MAAS creates this file, but something about 12.04.5 server is blocking it. This problem does NOT exist in any other server release. (I've not tested desktop releases.)

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Can you log into the 12.04.5 server by any means, and check whether cloud-init is installed? also, do the cloud-init log files in /var/log contain anything relevant? You can attach them to this bug if you like so I can review them.

[Rod Smith (rodsmith)]

I just checked, and cloud-init is *NOT* present on my 12.04.5 installation. It *IS* present on a 12.04.4 installation that works correctly.

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

OK, thanks for confirming my suspicion. All the tasks that aren't being performed, are done (AFAIK) by cloud-init on first boot. I'm now preparing an image with curtinator to try and figure out why cloud-init is uninstallable on 12.04.5. We try to install two packages on the image: cloud-init and ssh; if either is uninstallable, the entire apt process may fail. Anyway, checking...

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

OK, many of cloud-utils dependencies aren't installable: it complains about cloud-utils, python-cheetah, python-configobj, python-software-properties, python-yaml. THat's what I gleaned peeking at an in-progress installation. My next step is to do a full 12.04.5 install so I can better diagnose why the packages are wonky.

[Rod Smith (rodsmith)]

Yeah, I was thinking similar thoughts. Bug #1408465, though, affects ALL the releases (or at least the two or three I've tested), so there may be something else going on with it. Fortunately, it should be easy to work around. I'm about to test a two-line change to preseed.txt that creates the necessary file....

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Great: it can't install because it doesn't know about those packages, this in turn is because when trying to run apt-get update, it errors out with "Hash sum mismatch". Apparently when the 12.04.5 images were built, the apt databases in /var/lib/apt/lists had some weirdness, which causes them to not update correctly. For the record, this affected dpkg-offline as well, and I never figured out how to solve that problem with that tool :/

A solution as seen http://askubuntu.com/questions/265007/ubuntu-12-04-why-does-apt-get-update-fail is to rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* prior to running apt-get update (so those lists will be rebuilt from scratch). I'm testing a change to the curtinator preseed to work around this. For the record, though, the problem is one with the 12.04.5 images; but we always got shrugged off since the solution seems quite trivial, so the effort to re-issue the images apparently was deemed unnecessary.

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Hey, I pushed a fix for this, which removes the apt lists and runs apt-get update prior to trying to install any packages.

I made this generic for all releases (too lazy to special-case it to 12.04.5). So since the change is global, we should test it for all releases that interest us, but it should be harmless enough; the main consequence is a couple of extra minutes spent downloading index files.