Dynamic users' home directories are set to '/'

[simonello]

Here are the details of the dynamic user created.

(base) [root@jupyter jupyterenv]# getent passwd jupyter-someuser-singleuser
jupyter-someuser-singleuser:*:65492:65492:Dynamic User:/:/sbin/nologin
(base) [root@jupyter jupyterenv]# 

And here is one of the issues it causes.

[jupyter-someuser-singleuser@jupyter ~]$ ssh-keygen 
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (//.ssh/id_rsa): 
Could not create directory '//.ssh': Read-only file system
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Saving key "//.ssh/id_rsa" failed: No such file or directory
[jupyter-someuser-singleuser@jupyter ~]$ 

Here are the relevant variables.

USER=jupyter-someuser-singleuser
PWD=/var/lib/someuser
HOME=/var/lib/someuser
MAIL=/var/spool/mail/jupyter-someuser-singleuser
LOGNAME=jupyter-someuser-singleuser

How do I configure systemdspawner to set users to the correct home directory?

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[simonello]

Looks like this is an old existing issue with systemd..

systemd/systemd#9652

[ivan-tkatchev]

Looks like this is an old existing issue with systemd..

systemd/systemd#9652

No, it is an entirely different issue. @simonello pasted the output of getent - user entries exist, but contain incorrect information.

[bkreider]

This doesn't seem like a problem that SystemDspawner can address. This is a limitation of SystemD. A better writeup is in #92.

The problem you are seeing is with openSSH. SystemD doesn't have a configuration value to be able to set the user's home directory in nss-systemd. NSS is the low level linux system (libc) that provides, among other things, the user records (passwd).

Nearly all apps use $HOME first (and ~) and fall back to NSS, even though NSS really is the source of truth for user records. SSH keeps to that purity and uses nss.

Here is the source in openssh (pw->pw_dir):

snprintf(identity_file, sizeof(identity_file),  "%s/%s", pw->pw_dir, name);

You would be better served (re)opening an issue in SystemD and ask them for a keyword that lets you set $HOME and pw->pw_dir, for better compatibility with ALL Linux programs.

I'm not sure why it wasn't fixed -- it seems like an easy fix.