## What this teaches

How to setting user passwords fails on distro-packaged puppet 8.

## The problem

Issue puppetlabs/puppet#9320 (closed, 6 comments): user { password value > Sensitive(...) } failed on Fedora 39 with puppet 8.3.1 installed from distro packages. The maintainer traced it to the distro shipping an old libshadow against Ruby 3.2; the libshadow fix lives in puppet-runtime. The reporter confirmed the official puppet-agent packages work.

## What worked (verified answer)

If creating users with passwords fails on puppet 8 installed from your distros packages (Fedora hit this with an old libshadow on Ruby 3.2), switch to the official puppet-agent packages from Puppet instead of the distro build. The official packages carry the fixed libshadow. Distro puppet packages lag behind and can carry exactly this kind of native-extension mismatch.

## Source

gh:puppetlabs/puppet#9320 - https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/issues/9320