remoteUser in devcontainer.json doesn't work in corporate environment

[clssn]

Issue Type: Bug

Reason: users are not listed in /etc/passwd because they are taken from a corporate domain controller via sssd.
Potential solution: use id -u username and id -g username to determine the user's uid/gid.

VS Code version: Code 1.44.2 (ff915844119ce9485abfe8aa9076ec76b5300ddd, 2020-04-16T17:50:03.709Z)
OS version: Linux x64 4.15.10-041510-generic
Fetching remote diagnostics for 'Dev Container: C++' failed.

[SirFerdek]

Hi,
I thought I was doing something wrong when configuring my devcontainer, I missed a critical line in the documentation once again ;) or it's not supported with WLS2 and couldn't figure out why Developing inside a container on a remote docker host did not automatically update my UID and GID as described.

Turns out I hit the exact scenario as described by @clssn - my username does not exist in /etc/passwd on the remote host as it is recevied via sssd. I think the proper way to obtain numerical UID and GID in this environment would be to use something like

getent passwd USERNAME

It's a pity we cannot see the source code to fix this ourselves... ;) But well, the issue still exists and source code available probably since 04-2022 at https://github.com/devcontainers/cli

it cost me 6 hours of dev time. You guys probably have a lot on your plate either way, but is there any small chance this could be fixed in, like, next year maybe? :D

Or at least add a small disclaimer in the documentation, so guys like me stop wasting their time.

[jaron-l]

As a note, there really isn't a great way to work around this. When trying to manually add the user to a container as suggested by the add non-root user doc, the Dockerfile needs the UID and GID to be passed in as build args. However, using the following devcontainer.json passes empty GID and UID varialbes so the build fails. The only solution I've come up with is to have developers manually edit the Dockerfile to use their UID and GID and not commit it.

"name": "Example",
	"build": {
		"dockerfile": "Dockerfile",
        "args": {
            "USERNAME": "${env:USER}",
            "USER_UID": "${env:UID}",
            "USER_GID": "${env:GID}"
        }
	},

[chrmarti]

Updating to use getent passwd <user> in Dev Containers extensions 0.300.0-pre-release.

[Alwaysproblem]

it is worked for me with version v0.300.0, Thanks @chrmarti

[akkuman]

getent passwd <user>更新以在开发容器扩展 0.300.0-预发行版中使用。

getent passwd error ret code 2

but sudo getent passwd success

env:
ubuntu + samba AD

@chrmarti

[romankarlstetter]

I have a problem with this change. Our setup: windows domain controller with opensuse linux hosts. User name on linux host has the following format:
DOMAINNAME\username, i.e., it contains a backslash.

As a consequence, getent passwd DOMAINNAME\username fails with return code 2.

One of
getent passwd "DOMAINNAME\username" or
getent passwd DOMAINNAME\\username
would work.