Hello, On Fri, Nov 03, 2023 at 12:05:14PM +0000, Paul Tansom via BitFolk Users wrote: I'd probably just create a new user and lock the "ubuntu" user. Don't forget to put the new user into the "sudo" group so it can use sudo. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Hi, On Fri, Nov 03, 2023 at 08:33:29PM +0000, Ian via BitFolk Users wrote: I think so, and also it can execute arbitrary code at various steps, but… For basically its entire existence Ubuntu has forced the creation and use of an additional non-privileged user account and discouraged direct use of the root account. If Akamai or whoever is providing a default image of Ubuntu that only has a root user, that would be a surprising and strange departure from normal behaviour for most Ubuntu users. In general I want to keep things as close to a default install as possible. We would get more confusion and requests to put it back to default than there are to not have the non-root user. So then one might ask if we could give people the option of changing what the initial user name is, and we certainly could, but I would have to ask what the point is. If we have to ask whether you want the default initial user name, then if not what user name you DO want, and then if password auth is to be allowed what the password should be, well… it's not a lot more key strokes to just type the three commands needed to create a new user and disable the "ubuntu" one. $ sudo adduser jbloggs $ sudo usermod -a -G sudo jbloggs $ sudo usermod -L ubuntu (THe approach of renaming the user and home directory may be better if one wanted to retain the SSH authorized_keys etc.) Rather than add complexity for everyone in order to satisfy particular minority requests, I think it is better to just provide something that works closely to upstream defaults. Users can then customise it starting from a known baseline, preferably with their own choice of config management. I think I would be more receptive to users wanting to provide their own cloud-init or Debian preseed data if those were popular requests. However the trend has been to move away from more OS-specific bootstrapping methods in favour of getting a basic image up and running and then having config management of choice configure it. cloud-init sits somewhere in the middle, as it is a lot more cross-platform. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Hello, On Sat, Nov 04, 2023 at 02:10:20PM +0100, Samuel Bächler via BitFolk Users wrote: Just to be clear, I do not believe that the initial user as created by cloud-init on Ubuntu is used for any package on Ubuntu. It is just that there needs to be SOME user for you to actually log in, as ubuntu doesn't use root for logins. On Red Hat images they chose "cloud-user". On Arch they chose "arch". As far as I know it's just arbitrary and there would be no consequences from changing it or deleting it. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting