Hi Ansgar and Goswin,
Thank you very much for the explanation! It did seem that the qluman-exec scripts would always write a fresh file, as I noticed that SSHing into a node and manually changing a file and/or its permissions was all overwritten during each qluman node synchronization.
All is working well now, even after reboots sssd.conf gets written as it should (as expected). Is there any mechanism for me to submit a patch request to qluman, or can you take it from here?
Next up I'm chasing down where /etc/system/logind.conf gets written to the compute nodes, as I'm building somewhat of a Frankenstein cluster - I'm using a big pile of old laptops discarded by others as a hodge-podge cluster of diskless, very power efficient nodes. I can start a new thread on that if I don't figure it out soon. That's my home/hobby cluster, the one I wrote about above is a regular rack of identical, diskless 1U server nodes.
Cheers, -Mike