Actually I think that may have been a red herring, I think "- name:trent" was the actual problem: that's parsed as ["name:trent"], not {"name": "trent"}. Which then means that the parser expects the following line to be a list item, and it's a mapping item, hence the blow up.
Regardless, glad you got this sorted! ** Changed in: cloud-init Status: Incomplete => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Yahoo! Engineering Team, which is subscribed to cloud-init. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1869306 Title: Users module errors for users of same SSH key type with existing user Status in cloud-init: Invalid Bug description: I'm starting an instance (tried both centos and ubuntu) in AWS with user_data similar to the following: users: - name: bob sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL groups: users lock_passwd: true ssh_authorized_keys: - ssh-rsa some-ssh-pubkey-xxxxxxxxx - name: alice sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL groups: users lock_passwd: true ssh_authorized_keys: - ssh-rsa some-ssh-pubkey-xxxxxxxxx - name: mallory sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL groups: users lock_passwd: true ssh_authorized_keys: - ssh-rsa some-ssh-pubkey-xxxxxxxxx - name: trent sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL groups: users lock_passwd: true ssh_authorized_keys: - ssh-ed25519 some-ssh-pubkey-xxxxxxxxx Two things are special in this case. Mallory made herself a user account on the box before baking the original image, and Trent has an ECC key (the rest are using RSA). Upon running this in AWS, only Trent gets created. The only discernible error I have seen is: File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/ssh_util.py", line 208, in us ers_ssh_info pw_ent = pwd.getpwnam(username) KeyError: 'getpwnam(): name not found: alice' Trent can log in and see that his key has been created, but literally every other user who is using an RSA SSH key hasn't had their user created. Compounding it, Mallory doesn't have a login but still retains her home directory. The fix for this entails making a user "mallory2" and leaving mallory alone. When this happens, all users get created (though mallory's original account is missing other than /home). I've also tried making a mallory user with a custom homedir of /home/mallorytoo, but the same error happens. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1869306/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~yahoo-eng-team Post to : yahoo-eng-team@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~yahoo-eng-team More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp