Adding Additional User Accounts to a VM

This document provides instructions and commands to add additional user accounts to existing cloud VMs, steps are provided for each supported operating system.

Prerequisites

sudo level access to the machines you wish to add the new users to.
The username of each user you wish to add.
1. For STFC users we recommend using their Fed ID (STFC Username) for consistency.
The corresponding SSH Public Key for each user.

We do not recommend setting passwords for added users and as such the following instructions only provide steps to allow additional users to authenticate using SSH Key based authentication.

Rocky Linux

Ubuntu

Example Public Keys

The following keys are all examples used to demonstrate acceptable formatting of public keys in authorized keys files.

# RSA-2048
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDDdIsfXr82WFXNfw+RfECqitp/5wPeR670TO8gj/F7ypRPi80wLRKBF85LVN9T/E0b0+Ur6E1sMRWI9xAnxW2O1uSZ4f1TqlzbL4jqmbQuGRNIKroyOtHwmHiLca5fbwLRyXLXXyjSOp//8QMzM8SaslavAv8sGPvrGMtceytGIpVi90OrArFJYfDbUOs7mqfNATYBcMl2Ql/cnnHPrHiRU9VCMc05cjymoy9DHZN5Enfnew+Q/NBODpQd8yvQV2EJj3mduKJc3MGj/xR8ODux0hI3iPUM9DRHxEYl3+RzQV3xXHRycv3tJzvDIgtCYT3cp/scXKiecmMh6Kprq+JH rsa-key-20240816

# ECDSA (nistp384)
ecdsa-sha2-nistp384 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAzODQAAAAIbmlzdHAzODQAAABhBE60HgYZDYWngeNi88Ymy0TVhYQsTJ7SvKT6XFeun5tIfUJ1jssy7yZVygZguK9ci9ojdP5s70XDjoOdM0C0wdqyC3KX/dRz6iwrwadT4IqZZOsNJrddKJBxsqZ3TNTqKA== ecdsa-key-20240816

# EdDSA (Ed25519)
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIJx6CptzpgLxJwvHXa1OAh2CzyaDHw0esi7ZuWKK9quy eddsa-key-20240816