[chef] Am I crazy or is manage_home=>true broken in Chef 10.14

[Tim Smith < >]

I just upgraded my first preproduction system from Chef 10.12 to 10.14 and I'm now getting run fails due to chef-client trying to run usermod with bad syntax.  Thanks to the nice error reporting in 10.14 I can give a human readable format of the error:

================================================================================

Error executing action `create` on resource 'user[bob]'

================================================================================

Chef::Exceptions::Exec

----------------------

usermod -u '5656' bob -m returned 2, expected 0

Compiled Resource:

------------------

# Declared in /var/cache/chef/cookbooks/some_cookbook/recipes/ubuntu.rb:124:in `from_file'

user("bob") do

  recipe_name "ubuntu"

  password "SURE…."

  home "/home/bob"

  username "bob"

  supports {:manage_home=>true}

  cookbook_name "some_cookbook"

  retry_delay 2

  uid "5656"

  retries 0

  action :create

  shell "/bin/bash"

End

So what happens when you execute "usermod -u '5656' bob –m" on a box:

sudo usermod -u '5656' bob  -m

Usage: usermod [options] LOGIN

Options:

  -c, --comment COMMENT         new value of the GECOS field

  -d, --home HOME_DIR           new home directory for the user account

  -e, --expiredate EXPIRE_DATE  set account expiration date to EXPIRE_DATE

  -f, --inactive INACTIVE       set password inactive after expiration

                                to INACTIVE

  -g, --gid GROUP               force use GROUP as new primary group

  -G, --groups GROUPS           new list of supplementary GROUPS

  -a, --append                  append the user to the supplemental GROUPS

                                mentioned by the -G option without removing

                                him/her from other groups

  -h, --help                    display this help message and exit

  -l, --login NEW_LOGIN         new value of the login name

  -L, --lock                    lock the user account

  -m, --move-home               move contents of the home directory to the

                                new location (use only with -d)

  -o, --non-unique              allow using duplicate (non-unique) UID

  -p, --password PASSWORD       use encrypted password for the new password

  -s, --shell SHELL             new login shell for the user account

  -u, --uid UID                 new UID for the user account

  -U, --unlock                  unlock the user account

  -Z, --selinux-user            new SELinux user mapping for the user account

Tim Smith

Operations Engineer, SaaS Operations

M: +1 707.738.8132

TW: @tas50

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