[Puppet Users] strange string in /etc/shadow

Gus F.
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:39:09 -0000

Hi,

I am using puppet (version 0.25.5-1.e15 for redhat) for password
management for non-system users. This morning,  users on some of my
puppet clients had their encrypted password strings in /etc/shadow
replaced with the following string:

YAML::syck::BadAlias

That has effectively broken the users'' ability to login to those
servers.  Puppet will not overwrite that string with the correct
encrypted string, and I can''t even change the password manually using
''passwd'', because I get an ''Authentication token
manipulation error''.
The only way I can fix this is by manually editing /etc/shadow,
replaced that YAML string with something valid (I''ve been using an
''*''),  and then changing the password manually or letting
puppet
overwrite it with the correct password.

What could have caused this?