Userify Shim

Open Source agent for the Userify EC2 SSH Key Manager

Customizable deployment for enterprise datacenters and the cloud

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The Userify shim creates users, manages sudo permissions, etc based on the user accounts that you've configured in the Userify web console (https://console.userify.com) or through the API. It wakes up once every 90 seconds, checks for things to do, and goes back to sleep.

The shim is designed to be extremely lightweight and easy to integrate and customize into cloudinit, chef recipes, puppet manifests, RPMs, DEBs,... We're here to help. If you experience any issues, let us know.

It has zero requirements beyond what is included in every major distribution today.

System Requirements

The Userify shim is very short (please read it for yourself) and only requires:

• Linux 2.6 or later
• curl (command-line), sudo
• Python 2.6 or later (for httplib timeout, simplejson)
• HTTPS access (currently proxies are not supported)

These basics are built-in to most Linux distributions made in the last five years, including Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, and derivatives.

Tested distributions: RHEL6, RHEL7, CentOS7, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu (min 10.04LTS), Debian (min 6). Although currently no BSD-based UNIX (incl OS X) is supported, we are looking forward to that soon.

What does the installer do?

• Create /opt/userify and credentials file in it (creds.py)
• Patch /etc/rc.local (/etc/init.d/after.local on SUSE) with a link to the daemon
• Creates an uninstall script at /opt/userify/uninstall.sh
• Kicks off shim every 90 seconds

Using older versions of Linux

Using an older Linux version such as RHEL5 where the default Python 2.4 is nearly ten years old? You'll need to install a Python 2.7 RPM (check DAG's repo) which will leave your existing Python 2.4 available for system usage. Then set the PYTHON environment variable to your new version of Python in /etc/rc.local as follows:

PYTHON=/usr/bin/python2.6 /opt/userify/shim.sh &

(Note: installer.sh will no longer start shim.sh automatically.)

Enterprise Support Available

For free integration support, please email [email protected].

To get signed up with a paid enterprise support package, please email [email protected].

Get In Touch

We are available to assist with questions, custom installations, directory integrations or deployments, self-hosted installations, and professional consulting. Please open an issue with your question or contact support for assistance.

Troubleshooting

I'm using a cloud-init.yml file but once my host is launched my userify users don't work

This could be caused by any number of things, but if cloud-init runs into issues before reaching your - curl ... command then any number of things could happen. Due to timing issues and the contents of your cloud-init.yml file this could happen all the time, or only very occasionally.

1. Make sure you don't have multiple calls to installing the userify shim.
2. If you have separate ssh access to the server: First, make sure you're logging the cloud-init output somewhere:

   output:
     all: '| tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log'

   If you see something like the following in it:

   /opt/userify/shim.sh: line 26: -u: command not found
   curl: (23) Failed writing body (0 != 16011)
   

   then the userify shim isn't able to find python. As the shim also attempts to install python as part of the process, the most common cause of this is from a timing issue with the package installer. If you're able to, try uncommenting the packages section of your cloud-init file and see if that solves the problem.
3. Contact support or open an issue.