[Users] Slackware 13 weirdness

[Mark Johanson]

Having a weird problem with the Slackware 13 contributed template, and I
was wondering if anyone else has seen this type of issue before. The
template is straight download to the node, and then a vps built from
it. 

When you try changing the root password the process runs just as you
will see below:

root at server:/# passwd
Changing password for root
Enter the new password (minimum of 5 characters)
Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
Bad password: too short.  
Warning: weak password (enter it again to use it anyway).
passwd: password changed.
root at server:/#          

It doesn't allow you to enter a password, it just spits out the above as
soon as you hit enter after typing in passwd. The same is true if you
type in passwd root. To see if it was just a root issue I created a
slacktest user. The issue was the same:

root at server:/# useradd slacktest 
root at server:/# passwd slacktest
Changing password for slacktest
Enter the new password (minimum of 5 characters)
Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
Bad password: too short.  
Warning: weak password (enter it again to use it anyway).
passwd: password changed.

(also tried through the adduser process but resulted in the same result
on password entry)

root at server:/# ls -l /usr/bin/passwd 
-rws--x--x 1 root root 56255 Feb 28  2010 /usr/bin/passwd*

The node is running the following:

CentOS release 5.5 (Final)

root at server:/# uname -a
Linux 2.6.32-feoktistov.1 #1 SMP Fri Mar 4 19:19:45 MSK 2011 i686 

Any one else seen this issue before in either Slack13 template or in a
different template. This is the first time I have ever seen something
like this and not exactly sure what the issue is. I don't believe its
due to the template being i386 running on a x86_64 system as Slack12
template does not have this issue.