[2.5.3] Unable to add new users using curtin in CentOS

[andreserl]

You should look at doing this like it’s described here if you wanna leverage curtin:

Simple question, hard to find the answer... How to change default user of deployed Machine?

I wanted to post my progress for posterity sake: OK, so I did that and I’m liking how this works. I added the user to the /etc/maas/preseeds/curtin_userdata_custom file so that the configuration we’re adding applies to the custom images we’re using vs everything. At first it failed. Completely. I checked the cloud-init logs on the ephemeral test host and found no references to the stuff I placed in my config. In fact, the file I told it to write out did not exist on the test machine. I was ve…