Using password-less user for initial Management Console setup

vctrstrm

I've been evaluating Vertica 9.2.x EON on AWS and ran into problems with initial configuration of the Management Console.

Specifically, I installed Management Console on a separate host from the cluster and I want to use an existing, password-less (i.e. non-login, service) unix user on that host to run the Management Console process. However, after installing the Management Console RPM, it runs as root and it does not allow me to proceed through configuration wizard without entering a password. Even if i make up some password just to be able to proceed through the setup wizard, MC just gets to the end of setup and then reboots, reports non-specific failure and a factory reboot (as per logs).

Is there any way i can skip configuration wizard and force MC to run as a specific, existing Unix user, without password; meanwhile, also creating a separate Non-Unix MC WebUI user that will be used to log into the MC app ?

vctrstrm

Managed to get the MC working with an ugly hack...

• setting up MC on a separate host where MC does have useradd/usermod abilities and then copying the "mcdb" directory from that host to the host where i have the password-less user.

This worked but now I can't change the MC web user password because (it seems) MC also tries to change the password of the unix user and the end result is that it becomes impossible to log back into the MC web console because no password (either old or new) is accepted.

• Is there really no way to manage the MC web superuser separately from the unix user that's used to run the vertica-consoled java process??? I guess the idea was to have MC with root privileges so it can be used to provision/install new nodes/clusters, but what if all I'm using MC for is to manage an already-existing database rather than anything lower level? Is there a middle ground?