Raskas’ blog

If you try to manage users and there passwords with puppet on CentOs you will receive the error explained by “Known issues” on following page: Puppet on RedHat/CentOS. That page also describes the solution: install the libshadow package on the client.
It is not that easy because there is not yet an rpm of the ruby shadow libraries for CentOs.

“Not yet” because there IS a ruby-shadow rpm available in fedora (see: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=240008).

So we only need to download and rebuild it:
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/6/SRPMS/ruby-shadow-1.4.1-6.fc6.src.rpm
rpmbuild --rebuild ruby-shadow-1.4.1-6.fc6.src.rpm


Once we have that rebuilded rpm we can install it on all our puppet-clients. Off course we are not going to do this manually but use puppet for it .
If you have a local repository you can just add the package, but this is not yet the case for my setup so we need some extra rules.
Here is a snippet of puppet manifest:

class ruby-shadow {
   package {
      "ruby-shadow":
         ensure   => installed,
         provider => rpm,
         source   => "/tmp/ruby-shadow-1.4.1-6.i386.rpm",
         require  => file["/tmp/ruby-shadow-1.4.1-6.i386.rpm"],
   }

   file {
      "/tmp/ruby-shadow-1.4.1-6.i386.rpm":
         source => "puppet://puppetmaster/files/ALL/tmp/ruby-shadow-1.4.1-6.i386.rpm"
   }
}

class users {
   include ruby-shadow
   user {
      "root":
         ensure   => present,
         name     => "root",
         password => "SomeAlreadyEncryptedPassword";
   }
}

With this code it will require 2 runs of the puppet client. Even if you add a require in the user section for the ruby-shadow package 2 runs are necessary. Don’t know if this is a bug or a feature…