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Puppet needs user passwords in configuration files to be encrypted in the format the local system expects. For Linux and most unix-like system, that means, you have to put the sha1 sum of the password into the configuration file.

There are quite a few ways to generate those password hashes, e.g.

$ openssl passwd -1
  Password: 
  Verifying - Password: 
  $1$HTQx9U32$T6.lLkYxCp3F/nGc4DCYM/

You can then take the hash string and use it as password in a puppet configuration (e.g. http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/stable/type.html#user)

user { 'root':
  ensure           => 'present',
  password         => '$1$HTQx9U32$T6.lLkYxCp3F/nGc4DCYM/',
}

Be sure to put the password in single quotes if it contains a dollar sign ($) to ensure that puppet does interpret those as variables.

The kioslave fish:/ enables you to access remote files through ssh, even if sftp is not installed on the remote host. It’s much more convenient than its cousin sftp:/, e.g. because dolphin remembers file associations etc.

Unfortunately, fish:/ requires perl. It copies a perl script to the remote host and execute it there. So if you run into an error like

Could not enter folder fish://root@HOST/root

when you try to point konqueror or dolphin to fish://root@HOST, the culprit could simply be a missing perl package on the remote host. Installing perl-URI should suffice:

# yum install perl-URI

For further debugging of the fish:/ kioslave, have a look at http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Debugging/Debugging_IOSlaves/Debugging_kio_fish