[00:00] Olivier67: that depends on your user-data contents [00:00] did you specify "chpasswd:" in your user-data? [00:02] if you want ssh-key based login for users then you need to specify the key(s) to use via "ssh_authorized_keys:" in either the "users:" section or globally [06:53] no for the moment , I just want to have auth by password , I will introduce SSH after [06:53] here is an example of my user-data [06:53] users: [06:53]   - name: user1 [06:53]     plain_text_passwd: Pass4Labo [06:53]     #password: $6$qra9xrGVdH$aGNC14yvGe4Po3M9WodfVpQt76GE/KmUvCT0/78qH0odS1WlgpcVg0vSnG45ByBXL2Dwn9AoALJpIU8rSgQ44/ [06:53]     groups: sudo [06:53]     shell: /bin/bash [06:53]   - name: user2 [06:53]     #plain_text_passwd: Pass4Labo [06:53]     passwd: $6$qra9xrGVdH$aGNC14yvGe4Po3M9WodfVpQt76GE/KmUvCT0/78qH0odS1WlgpcVg0vSnG45ByBXL2Dwn9AoALJpIU8rSgQ44/ [06:53]     groups: sudo [06:53]     shell: /bin/bash [06:54] I have also tried with hash_passwd [13:28] Olivier67: for each user entry add "lock_passwd: false" as this defaults to true (so disabling password-based logins) [13:28] this is indicated in the users section of the docs: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/modules.html#users-and-groups [13:29] and what you observed in the logs confirms this: "running command [ 'passwd' , '-l', 'user']" === hexa- is now known as h === h is now known as hexa- [19:39] blackboxsw, holmanb sorry about the late reply, was already out of the office. I have updated the gist at https://gist.github.com/jbfriedrich/348e988ba26a5a8631d7b33395a0ca90. Right now I think that the issue lies with Cloud Init