User Management for Provisioned Nodes

Managing users on the nodes requires generally 2 stages. The first is making sure the users home directory and environment is present on the nodes. The second is getting the users credentials and user information to the nodes.

User’s environments

This requires the home directory of the user(s) in question to be shared to the nodes. NFS is a typical solution for this, but because there are so many methods and variables for doing this we will make the assumption you have already done this in a manner that works for your environment.

Once the user’s home directory is present on the nodes, enabling passwordless ssh is as easy as generating a ssh keypair without a passphrase, and copying the public key to authorized_keys for each user as follows:

$ ssh-keygen
$ cat ~/.ssh/*.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

User credentials ¶

Managing users with the File Warewulf interface can be done as follows:

$ sudo su -
# wwsh file import /etc/passwd
# wwsh file import /etc/group
# wwsh provision set --fileadd passwd,group

This will cause all nodes to have these two files provisioned when the boot, and updated within 5 minutes.

Whenever updates are made to the password file (e.g. a user is added) to update the files within Warewulf, you must run:

$ sudo wwsh file sync