Deployment

Local VMs

Please see the Cloud Images Wiki page for the list of images available. If you intend to deploy a local instance (without GitHub), you can use one of the images above but add following directives to rcloud.conf:

gist.backend: gitgist
gist.git.root: ${ROOT}/data/gists
Exec.auth: as-local

and make sure permissions leading to /data/rcloud/data/gists are sufficient:

sudo chgrp -R rcloud /data/rcloud/data
sudo chmod -R g+rwx /data/rcloud/data

Multiple local users

If you want to support multiple users in the instance, you will have to run the QAP service as root and enable PAM authentication. To do that, make sure SessionKeyServer has been compiled with PAM support and then in rcloud.conf use:

Exec.auth: pam
Exec.match.user: login

In order to run the QAP service as root edit /data/rcloud/services/rcloud-qap and replace

exec su - rcloud /data/rcloud/services/rcloud-start

with

exec /data/rcloud/services/rcloud-start

Again, adjust the permissions of the gist directory:

sudo chmod a+rx /data/rcloud/data
sudo chmod 0777 /data/rcloud/data/gists

Finally, run

sudo usermod -a -G shadow ubuntu

(see below why) and restart.

PAM and SKS

On some systems PAM using pam_unix.so will fail to authenticate users due to a restriction in unix_chkpwd. The error message will be cryptic:

unix_chkpwd[1444]: check pass; user unknown 

despite the fact that the user is actually correct and known. The full explanation is in this post. The most practical fix is to add the user running SKS into the shadow group (or whatever group owns /etc/shadow), e.g. for our Ubuntu cloud images that would be

sudo usermod -a -G shadow ubuntu