Comment 21 for bug 2049860

Hi DisasteR, thanks for attaching the logs.

ssh_pwauth gets handled by the set_passwords config module, which runs as part of the cloud-config stage.

The problem is that cloud-config and cloud-final stages didn't run because cloud-init is instructed to be disabled.

Some stanza in your user-data, vendor-data, instance-data or system-cfg instructs the config module write_files, which runs before cloud-config, to disable cloud-init.

One can see this in the log files and in:

# /run/cloud-init/combined-cloud-config.json
...
 "write_files": [
  {
   "owner": "root:root",
   "path": "/etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled",
   "permissions": "0644"
  }

One solution, if the disablement is still desired, is to use the defer subkey[1] of write-files to instruct cloud-init to touch the file as part of the cloud-final stage, not disturbing the other stages during the first boot.

[1] https://docs.cloud-init.io/en/latest/reference/modules.html#write-files