On 15 Jul 2014, at 12:27, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote: > On 07/15/2014 12:18 PM, Neil Wilson wrote: >> Essentially that should be the setup. Cloudinit should create the default user on startup, not the build process that creates the image. > > but the default user is defined in the cloud.cfg which is shipped in the > cloud-init package. > > my understanding is that unless the metadata supplied to the instance > overrides this, then this is the config that gets executed. > Yes that’s what I mean. i.e. there is no ‘user’ command in the kickstart file. cloud-init creates the user dynamically when the VM is created based upon the user data supplied - or the default in the config file.