Reverse engineering the “AADLoginForLinux” in order to tweak proactive user configuration

Introduction

Last summer I posted about taking a look under the hood of the Azure Active Directory integration for a Linux Virtual Machine. For today, let’s take it a bit further… What if we would want to pre-provision a set of UIDs (User IDs) & GIDs (Group IDs) on a range of virtual machines for cross machine consistency. Let’s say, we would want to make use of an NFS drive and use the same UID/GID across all those boxes. Can we do that with the AAD extension? If so, how can we do it? Let’s hope we can… Otherwise it’ll become a rather short blog post.

 

Disclaimer

This post is based upon my personal experience reverse engineering how this extension works. This is by no means a support statement. If you’re a technical nut (like myself) and want to know how you can tweak this at your own doing… Then this post is for you. 😉

Taking a look under the hood of the Linux VM Authentication

Introduction

Today we’ll do a deep-dive into how you can log into an Azure Linux VM with Azure Active Directory (AAD). In essence, we’ll go through the following documentation flow, and then take a look how that looks under the hood.

 

Part one : “Creation”

The part on creating & integrating the VM is VERY straightforward…

• Create a resource group
  
• Create a Linux virtual machine
  
• Add the “Azure AD login VM”-extension
  

And that’s it! Really, that’s it…