CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cloudvirtual-machinegoogle-compute-enginegoogle-cloud-platform
abraj
abraj

Reputation: 349

Google Cloud: Why my instance has 3 users created by default?

I have a virtual machine instance (Debian wheezy) running on Google Compute Engine. At the time of creation of the instance, by default there were 3 users (apart from root) in the /home directory. For example, if my email id (with which I login to Google cloud platform) is [email protected] then the 3 users in the /home directory are ab, abxyz and ab_xyz_co. I don't understand what's the point of creating 3 different users.

When I login, by default I am logged into the machine as the user abxyz. I also cannot assume that the other two users (ab and ab_xyz_co) just exist and are never used, because I can see some folders in the home directory of other 2 users whose size change whose time. Moreover, the sizes of these folders are different, i.e. same things are not being added to all the accounts.

What's going on? Any ideas?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1684

Answers (1)

Alexey Alexandrov
Alexey Alexandrov

Reputation: 3129

These are likely users you have SSH keys configured for in your project. Look at https://console.cloud.google.com/compute/metadata/sshKeys?project=<your project> to see if that's the case. You can delete SSH key records for the users you don't want to be present in the new instances. You will need to delete those users manually in the instances that are already running in the project though.

Upvotes: 10

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