Injecting the administrator password¶

Compute can generate a random administrator (root) password and inject that password into an instance. If this feature is enabled, users can run ssh to an instance without an ssh keypair. The random password appears in the output of the nova boot command. You can also view and set the admin password from the dashboard.

Password injection using the dashboard

By default, the dashboard will display the admin password and allow the user to modify it.

If you do not want to support password injection, disable the password fields by editing the dashboard’s local_settings file. On Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, the file location is /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings. On Ubuntu and Debian, it is /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py. On openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, it is /srv/www/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py

OPENSTACK_HYPERVISOR_FEATURES = {
...
    'can_set_password': False,
}

Password injection on libvirt-based hypervisors

For hypervisors that use the libvirt back end (such as KVM, QEMU, and LXC), admin password injection is disabled by default. To enable it, set this option in /etc/nova/nova.conf:

[libvirt]
inject_password=true

When enabled, Compute will modify the password of the admin account by editing the /etc/shadow file inside the virtual machine instance.

Password injection and XenAPI (XenServer/XCP)

When using the XenAPI hypervisor back end, Compute uses the XenAPI agent to inject passwords into guests. The virtual machine image must be configured with the agent for password injection to work.

Password injection and Windows images (all hypervisors)

For Windows virtual machines, configure the Windows image to retrieve the admin password on boot by installing an agent such as cloudbase-init.