Debian VMs came up with no configured user, no hostname and no SSH key,
so neither the console (erplibre/erplibre) nor SSH worked. Two causes,
found via the guest cloud-init.log:
1. The NoCloud seed was attached as a CD-ROM. Debian's initramfs does
not load the CD driver (sr_mod) at the init-local stage, so the
"cidata" volume was invisible and cloud-init fell back to an empty
DMI seed (Ubuntu tolerates the CD). Attach the seed as a read-only
virtio disk instead: virtio-blk is in the initramfs, the label is
seen immediately, and the user-data is applied. Works for Ubuntu too.
2. The user was added to group "admin", which does not exist on Debian
(it does on Ubuntu) -> useradd failed and the user was never created.
Use "sudo" (present on both) instead.
Validated end to end: Debian 12 and Ubuntu 24.04 both get the erplibre
user (in sudo), the hostname, console login erplibre/erplibre and SSH by
key.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mathieu Benoit
dc9dfa5779