Ceph » mgr » Dashboard

With Ceph octopus (specifically we were running v15.2.7, but I did not check
other versions), it was possible to programmatically add users to our ceph
dashboard with saml2 sso integration using the following command:

ceph dashboard ac-user-create -o /dev/null $n "" administrator "" "" --enabled --force-password

However with the release of Ceph Pacific this is no longer possible. The ceph
dashboard ac-user-create command no longer takes a password on the command line,
instead requiring it be stored in a file and passed in with -i /path/to/passfile.

Unfortunately, you can no longer pass in an empty password using this mechanism, even with --force-password

# echo "" > /tmp/emptypass
# ceph dashboard ac-user-create test-empty-pw administrator --enabled --force-password -i /tmp/emptypass
Error EINVAL: Empty content: please add a password/secret to the file.

While it is possible to work around this by just generating a random password
string, doing so is cumbersome and could lead to confusion in the future.

It would be great if support for adding users without passwords was re-added to the cli.
Another option is to implement better support for saml2 sso integration so that the dashboard
understands the difference between both user types.