04 How‐to log in with GDM

Logging in with a remote provider

Once the system is configured you can log into your system using your MS Entra ID credentials and the device code flow.

In the login screen (greeter), select not listed below the user name field.

Type your MS Entra ID user name. The format is [email protected]

Select the broker Microsoft Entra ID

If MFA is enabled, a QR code and a login code are displayed.

From a second device, flash the QR code or type the URL in a web browser, then follow the authentication process from your provider.

Upon successful authentication, the user is prompted to enter a local password. This password can be used for offline authentication.

In our example the user authd test is a member of the following Azure groups:

This translates to the following unix groups on the local machine:

~$ groups
[email protected] sudo azure_oidc_test

There are three types of groups:

Primary group: Created automatically based on the user name
Local group: Group local to the machine prefixed with linux-. For instance if the user is a member of the Azure group linux-sudo, they will be a member of the sudo group locally.
Remote group: All the other Azure groups the user is a member of.

authd is socket-activated. It means that the service starts on-demand when it receives a request on a socket.

If you want to restart the service, you can stop it with systemctl stop authd and it will restart automatically on the next message it receives.

Run /usr/libexec/authd --help to display the entire help.

The broker is managed through the snap command.

The main operation is to restart the broker to reload the configuration when it has changed. You can reload the broker with the command:

snap restart authd-msentraid