installing cloud init in vmware breaks ubuntu user

[Christian Ehrhardt ]

When installing cloud-init in vmware without any setup for user/vendor data it breaks the ubuntu user.

Steps to reproduce:
1. take vmwre (free 30 days is fine)
2. install xenial (maybe newer as well but my case was xenial)
3. set up your user to be ubuntu/ubuntu (through the vmware fast installer)
# you now have a working system
# no user/vendor data provider was set up (unless vmware did some internally)
4. install cloud-init
5. reboot
# on reboot I see the cloud init vmware data gatherer timing out (fine as expected)
# But after that I can't login anymore, so it seems it changed the user

This came up in debugging another issue - so there is a chance I messed the service dependencies up enough to trigger this :-/ (we need to check that)

Sorry, this sucks at getting logs and since I can't login anymore ...
I'll have to setup a new system with a second user to use to take a look.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

I now have a second system, did not mess with the job dependencies (yet) on this one and created a secondary admin user to get to the logs.

Kicking a reboot on this again shows cloud-init failing to get the date (as expected)
Like:
url_helper.py to 169.254.169.254:80 (no route)
...
some 50 second timeouts later after giving up I now have the ubuntu user locked up (or PW changed) again.

Logging in with my secondary user should allow me to attach logs here ...

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

cloud-init.log http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/WwRp8ggDdr/
cloud-init-output.log http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/RVystXn6VQ/

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

I suspect this is 16.04 only.
in 18.04, ds-identify should disable cloud-init correctly.
in 16.04 its still set to reporting only mode. and in the log it shows that the list got set to Ec2 (maybe).

I'm not sure what you were expectin though, whether you thouht cloud-init should get some vmware data from somewhere.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

I expected it not to break, let me (try to) recreate and talk later (hopefully my vmware still works ...).

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

"not to break" is rather useless statement - I beg your pardon.
Better:
I'd expect it to:
- cloud-init wont work as there is no datasource (fine
- cloud-init not to change my user in a way that I can't log in anymore.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

In a joint debug session it was found that the user gets locked by the none Datasource.

Fixed in Bionic due to better DS detection.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Maybe the none DS should not add/lock user.
Without data adding that it is worth nothing.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

So in cloud-init on bionic, in the scenario that Christian was running in, cloud-init would disable itself so that no disabling of the ubuntu user would occur.

quite possibly we could or should re-visist the use case of the None datasource, possibly making it *not* create a user at all.

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

upstream changed to Fix Released as it is the same status as Ubuntu.

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/3121