Superuser Credentials don't work

[damiondoesthings]

Hi, I was following the docs here to enable authentication + superuser using the Kubernetes operator.

I created a secret "foobar-superuser" with two keys: "password" containing "thepassword" and "superusers.txt" containing "superuser:thepassword:SCRAM-SHA-256".

Then I create the cluster with the spec below, however when trying to use the superuser credentials they do not work, I get this error: "SASL authentication failed: security: Invalid credentials"
The Redpanda console pod fails with the same error.

I am suspicious of the "--no-set-superusers" in statefulset.sideCars.args but it seems to be the default, since I did not set this value explicitely.

Operator Version: 25.1.3

Redpanda CR:

chartRef: {}
clusterSpec:
  auth:
    sasl:
      enabled: true
      secretRef: foobar-superuser
      users: []
  commonLabels: {}
  external:
    domain: foobar.example.com
    enabled: true
    externalDns:
      enabled: false
    service:
      enabled: false
    type: LoadBalancer
  image:
    tag: v25.1.3
  listeners:
    admin:
      external:
        default:
          enabled: false
    http:
      enabled: false
    kafka:
      external:
        default:
          advertisedPorts:
            - 9093
          authenticationMethod: sasl
  resources:
    cpu:
      cores: 2
    memory:
      container:
        max: 8Gi
        min: 8Gi
  statefulset:
    podTemplate:
      annotations:
        prometheus.io/scrape_redpanda_broker: "true"
    replicas: 4
    sideCars:
      args:
        - --no-set-superusers
    topologySpreadConstraints:
      - maxSkew: 1
        topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
        whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway
    updateStrategy:
      type: RollingUpdate
  storage:
    persistentVolume:
      size: 300Gi
      storageClass: redpanda-data
  tls:
    certs:
      external:
        caEnabled: false
        issuerRef:
          kind: ClusterIssuer
          name: letsencrypt-dns01
    enabled: true

[damiondoesthings]

It started working again after I removed the second key from the secret, i.e. only having "superusers.txt" in there.