PAMAuthenticator - unexpected behavior

Hello all,

first of all thank you for the hub, it has worked very well for us in teaching.

So far we have only a small test installation and now we want to go wide.

For this purpose, the hub is installed on an Ubuntu 20.04 on which PAM is configured on the system side. PAM works well system-wide and logging in via ssh works well.

Now I switched the hub to PAMAuthentificator, which also works but unfortunately not as expected: a new user with the prefix ‘jupyter-’ is created and only the credentials are fetched via PAM.

How do I get the hub to behave as if you were logging in locally via SSH, so it doesn’t create new users but simply takes the ones that are already there via PAM?

Best regards

Hi! Could you show us your full configuration with secrets redacted, and also tell us how you installed JupyterHub? In general the more information you provide the more likely it is that someone will be able to help.

This sounds like the behavior of the littlest jupyterhub, is that what you used to deploy jupyterhub? What Spawner are you using as well?

If you are using the default PAMAuthenticator and default LocalProcessSpawner, I do think you would get what you expect. But if you are using systemdspawner or other things, there may be some configuration you need to do to make sure it keeps JupyterHub’s default mapping to existing system users.