Foreman » Smart Proxy

Choria's (https://github.com/choria-io/mcollective-choria) mcollective ssl auth plugin looks for authentication keys in the running user's home directory.

When executed via sudo -u '~' is expanded to the running user's home directory rather than the impersonated user causing an authentication error.

e.g.

sysadmin@puppet:/usr/share/foreman-proxy$ sudo -u foreman-proxy /opt/puppetlabs/bin/mco find

The find application failed to run, use -v for full error backtrace details: No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - /home/sysadmin/.puppetlabs/etc/puppet/ssl/certs/foreman-proxy.mcollective.pem

This is confirmed as an issue on Ubuntu because sudo's env_keep is set to exclude $HOME by default on that distro. It may be an issue on other distros too.