Unable to create interactive "system" user

[Thomas H Jones II]

**Problem Description**
The systems I manage are subjected to specific security-hardening guidance that causes unwanted alerts for the default-user created by cloud init. Specifically, because cloud-init creates the default-user with a userid in the non "system" uid-range, the security-hardening validators expect that the default-user created by cloud-init will have password-aging attributes set. As the default-user account acts as a "break-glass" maintenance account, having password-aging is not generally not desirable.

While cloud-init provides the `system` parameter as a seeming out for this, using this parameter results in an account with no ${HOME} and, by extension, no ${HOME}/.ssh/authorized keys ...breaking the ability to configure the default-user account for key-based logins.

Tried using the `no_create_home` parameter and setting its value to `false` in hopes of overriding the `system` parameter's default behavior, but it seems like when `system` is set, `no_create_home` is wholly ignored.

I could probably use the `uid` parameter instead of the `system` parameter, but I fear that if I set a value like '500', I may cause problems for applications whose installers expect to be able to create a service-account with the same uid ('500' being an example value rather than a specific value).

**Cloud Provider**
AWS

**Version Info**

cloud-init 18.5 from RHEL/CentOS 7 cloud-init-18.5-3 RPM

[Ryan Harper (raharper)]

Hi,

Thanks for filing the issue. Would you be able to provide the tarball output from running 'cloud-init collect-logs' on an instance deployed with the config you would expect to work?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cloud-init because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/3612