Is your actual task changing user passwords on remote boxes?

Unless you have to do other tasks /locally/ on the remote machines, it seems overengineering to install modules, etc etc, just in order to do many password changes.

Consider doing your work (generating passwords with crypt ?) on the controlling side and using Net::OpenSSH to connect to the remote boxes and execute the 'usermod' program (I'm assuming linux/solaris) on the remote host which will save you a lot of coding work, is native to the system in question's configured passwd encryption formats and just lets you change a password with a single command.