Hi Hadmut and thanks for your additional debugging work here and for sharing your findings.
I agree this looks like a documentation issue: especially the fact that the 'identity' and 'user-data/users' sections are mutually exclusive and 'lock_passwd' need better documentation and possibly some examples. I think this belongs to subiquity (the Ubuntu Server installer) and not to cloud-init, so I added a new subiquity bug task.
The fact the user does not exist immediately after rebooting the newly installed system is normal: cloud-init needs some time to finish initializing the system. This is done at first boot.
On the issue you mentioned about cloud-init remaining active after first boot: I encourage you to file bugs for specific issues, but it's very likely that the cloud-init behaviors that caused you headaches are due to design choices made to accommodate common cloud usage scenarios. This said: there is certainly room for improvement in many aspects and good bug reports are always more than welcome.
Back to the auto-install issue this report is about: I'm setting the cloud-init task to Invalid, and leave the subiquity task open. Should you still think this is a cloud-init bug please comment back and change the task status back to New, we'll look at this again. Thanks!
Hi Hadmut and thanks for your additional debugging work here and for sharing your findings.
I agree this looks like a documentation issue: especially the fact that the 'identity' and 'user-data/users' sections are mutually exclusive and 'lock_passwd' need better documentation and possibly some examples. I think this belongs to subiquity (the Ubuntu Server installer) and not to cloud-init, so I added a new subiquity bug task.
The fact the user does not exist immediately after rebooting the newly installed system is normal: cloud-init needs some time to finish initializing the system. This is done at first boot.
On the issue you mentioned about cloud-init remaining active after first boot: I encourage you to file bugs for specific issues, but it's very likely that the cloud-init behaviors that caused you headaches are due to design choices made to accommodate common cloud usage scenarios. This said: there is certainly room for improvement in many aspects and good bug reports are always more than welcome.
Back to the auto-install issue this report is about: I'm setting the cloud-init task to Invalid, and leave the subiquity task open. Should you still think this is a cloud-init bug please comment back and change the task status back to New, we'll look at this again. Thanks!