Comment 5 for bug 1885527

I currently cannot give logs, since these were only temporary testing machines in a cloud, that existed only for tens of minutes to test installation procedures. I will supply logs as soon as a proceed with testing and the problem occurs again.

However, I do not understand and did not find any documentation about why cloud-init even remains active after first boot.

Descriptions like https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CloudInit or https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ are just misleading as they suggest, that this is just about the initialization of the machine. They don't tell that cloud-init remains active and keeps manipulating the system.

I found this to be a severy security issue (which I reported in an earlier bug report for 18.04) when I could not permanently change the hostname of a machine, since cloud-init was resetting it with every reboot, and the file, where this was stored, was hidden deeply somewhere in /var. I'm afraid I cannot even change a password, since cloud-init might reset it to it's initial state.

I do consider it as a serious flaw and security problem just that cloud-init is behaving very differently from what's described in the documentation.

AGAIN: Why is cloud-init still manipulating the machine *after* initialization and first boot?