I feel like I must be missing something obvious here. So I'm hoping someone can tell me why I'm being dumb before I try to submit an official bug report.
I recently downloaded the OVA version of the Ubuntu 16.04 cloud image and am attempting to deploy it to my vSphere 6 based vCenter instance via the web client. The nice thing about the "cloud image" over a regular ISO based template is that it comes with cloud-init baked in by default. The OVA version of this image exposes a bunch of the cloud-init options as vApp Options that can be filled in at the end of the wizard like this:
For the most part, this is all working great and as expected. The hostname gets set to the value of hostname. The default user's password gets set to the value of Default User's password.
The problem is that I'm now trying to use the Encoded user-data field to pass in a cloud config YAML file to do some additional tasks. For the moment, the simplest test I could think of was the following cloud-config script to create a single user named demo:
#cloud-config
users:
- name: demo
The instructions on the Encoded user-data field indicate I need to base64 encode the user data I'm passing in and it will then be decoded later. The example I found in the cloud-init source re-affirms this. So I did.
$ base64 -w0 cloud-config.txt && echo
I2Nsb3VkLWNvbmZpZwp1c2VyczoKICAtIG5hbWU6IGRlbW8K
And I pasted that encoded value into the Encoded user-data field and finished the wizard. But sadly, once the VM was finished deploying and came up, there was no "demo" user to be found.
So I dug into /var/log/cloud-init.log looking for clues and the only thing I found was a warning about the content-type of the user-data.
__init__.py[DEBUG]: Calling handler CloudConfigPartHandler: [['text/cloud-config-jsonp', 'text/cloud-config']] (__begin__, None, 3) with frequency always
__init__.py[DEBUG]: Calling handler BootHookPartHandler: [['text/cloud-boothook']] (__begin__, None, 2) with frequency always
__init__.py[DEBUG]: Calling handler ShellScriptPartHandler: [['text/x-shellscript']] (__begin__, None, 2) with frequency always
__init__.py[DEBUG]: {'MIME-Version': '1.0', 'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename="part-001"', 'Content-Type': 'text/x-not-multipart'}
__init__.py[WARNING]: Unhandled non-multipart (text/x-not-multipart) userdata: 'b'I2Nsb3VkLWNvbmZpZwp1c2Vy'...'
__init__.py[DEBUG]: Calling handler CloudConfigPartHandler: [['text/cloud-config-jsonp', 'text/cloud-config']] (__end__, None, 3) with frequency always
util.py[DEBUG]: Writing to /var/lib/cloud/instances/test01/cloud-config.txt - wb: [384] 0 bytes
__init__.py[DEBUG]: Calling handler BootHookPartHandler: [['text/cloud-boothook']] (__end__, None, 2) with frequency always
__init__.py[DEBUG]: Calling handler ShellScriptPartHandler: [['text/x-shellscript']] (__end__, None, 2) with frequency always
handlers.py[DEBUG]: finish: init-local/consume-user-data: SUCCESS: reading and applying user-data
handlers.py[DEBUG]: start: init-local/consume-vendor-data: reading and applying vendor-data
stages.py[DEBUG]: no vendordata from datasource
handlers.py[DEBUG]: finish: init-local/consume-vendor-data: SUCCESS: reading and applying vendor-data
I also looked for clues in /var/lib/cloud/instance. The user-data.txt file there contained the same base64 encoded value I had pasted into the wizard. There was also a user-data.txt.i file that contained the following:
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1746641247068827328=="
MIME-Version: 1.0
Number-Attachments: 1
--===============1746641247068827328==
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/x-not-multipart
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="part-001"
I2Nsb3VkLWNvbmZpZwp1c2VyczoKICAtIG5hbWU6IGRlbW8K
--===============1746641247068827328==--
The warning in the log file makes it seem like the primary problem is not related to the base64 encoding, but to the text/x-not-multipart that ends up in the user-data.txt.i file. But I'm not sure how that mime type even gets set.
Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong here?
