Atmoz/sftp container password keep resetting

General
1

So I inherited this problem from a colleague who left the company. He couldn’t solve it, or just didn’t care in his last months at the company, I can only speculate.

The problem is the passwords for the two in-use accounts keeps resetting intermittently, once or twice per month, then users can’t login anymore, and we need to manually change the passwords back to known values.

He deployed atmoz/sftp from a deploy link like found here: SFTP on Azure - Code Samples | Microsoft Learn

Both Azure portal and CLI shows restart count of the container as 0.
On the OS command line I can confirm that each time the users can’t login anymore that
a) The passwords for both accounts indeed resets, at exactly the same time
b) The accounts and passwords are not set expire and there’s no min or max number of days between
password changes
c) The root password does not change (also evident by me being able to connect as root in Azure)

This has got to be to do with the container that resets to default, but with no container restarts, I am puzzled.

The strange thing is we have a second atmoz/sftp deployment in production, but on that one the password reset problem doesn’t occur, ever. The config (at least in Azure) is identical, and on the Linux OS as far I can determine, looks identical.

When this was handed over to me instruction was to deploy a new atmoz/sftp container and test if the same thing happens. However with Docker rate limits introduced on 30 June, I am not able to deploy from a Docker hosted image anymore at all, which led me to troubleshoot the actual problem which is an even bigger rabbit hole. I am sure getting a pro docker subscription could solve that rate limit issue but unfortunately after trying to convince management to get a Docker subscription of $7 I was told no and to fix the current issue by comparing the problematic container to the working one.

I’m only basic level familiar with containers and Linux so I may by missing something simple.

2

Have you considered comparing the container configurations of the container that resets the password, and the container that does not?

You can get the configuration of a container by executing:

docker inspect {container name or id}

Run this for both containers, redirect the output to a file, and compare the two files with your favorite tool or ide.

3

Thanks. I don’t think it’s possible to use docker inspect on Azure Container Instances. But to be fair I see I didn’t explicitly state it was ACI in the OP.

Running az container show on Azure CLI on both containers I don’t see anything different in the config, but I don’t think it shows the depth of information possible using docker.