Allowing Root Login For Red Hat QCow2 Image

You should never depend on root login when dealing with OpenStack cloud. Pretty much all pre-prepared cloud images have it disabled by default. Ideally all your user provisioning should be done as part of the cloud-init procedure and there you should either create your own user or work with the default cloud-user and the key you provisioned. But what if you are troubleshooting some weird (network) issue and you need console login for your image?

Well, you can always re-enable root user by directly modifying qcow2 image.

To edit qcow2 images, we need first to install libguestfs-tools. On my Linux Mint, that requires the following:

Terminal  Copy
sudo apt-get install libguestfs-tools

Of course, if you are using yum or some other package manager, adjust accordingly. :)

Once installation is done, we simply mount image into /mnt/guestimage and modify the shadow file to assign password (changeme in this example) to the root user:

Terminal  Copy
sudo mkdir /mnt/guestimage
sudo guestmount -a rhel-server-7.5-update-3-x86_64-kvm.qcow2 -m /dev/sda1 /mnt/guestimage
sudo sed -i 's/root:!!/root:$1$QiSwNHrs$uID6S6qOifSNZKzfXsmQG1/' /mnt/guestimage/etc/shadow
sudo guestunmount /mnt/guestimage
sudo rmdir /mnt/guestimage

All nodes installed from this image will now allow you to use root login with password authentication. Just don't forget to remove this change once you're done troubleshooting.

PS: While I use Red Hat image in the example, the procedure also applies to CentOS and most of other cloud distributions too.