[19:06] <dasdascas> I'm trying to get a debian VM started up in QEMU using cloud-init. I followed the tutorial in the docs (https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/qemu.html) and it works with the ubuntu image it suggests. When I swap that image out for a debian one (this one: https://cdimage.debian.org/images/cloud/bookworm/20240429-1732/debian-12-generic-amd64-20240429-1732.qcow2), it stops worki
[19:06] <dasdascas> *it stops working. I get a console but can't log in with the username "debian" and the password that I set in user-data.
[19:07] <dasdascas> Mounting the VMs disk on the host machine, I can see an exception getting logged in /var/log/cloud-init.log that the user debian doesn't exist (log: https://pastebin.com/fWvwVSAV). 
[19:07] <dasdascas> Looking in /etc/passwd, there isn't an entry for debian, and only root has a login shell other than /usr/sbin/nologin. I tried a couple of older debian images and got the same result.
[19:07] <dasdascas>  This feels like a bug in the image, but I'm totally new to cloud-init so I could be misunderstanding something? Should I be able to swap the debian image in for the ubuntu image and have everything just keep working?
[21:03] <dasdascas> Turned out to be an issue with different cloud-init version in the two OSes. The debian one is 22.4, which needs `ds='nocloud-net';...` rather than `ds='nocloud';...` in the smbios serial number
[21:04] <blackboxsw> thanks dasdascas for the debug and followup comments there. 
[21:08] <dasdascas> Credit to the people in the debian-cloud channel for the debug