Strange Puppet nil:NilClass error message

Puppet is a very nice tool to do a lot of cool stuff, but sometimes it spews out error messages that seems a bit odd to the non Ruby hacker.

Ie. if your puppetmaster is down (or you misconfigured DNS) you'll get the following with puppet-0.25.4-r1:

err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: undefined method `closed?' for nil:NilClass


This error message is not too helpful, and looks like broken Puppet error reporting. If it wasn't for upstream talking about it (puppet bug #3101) I would think that I had b0rked Puppet error reporting locally.

With an older version ie. 0.24.8-r1 I error reporting is working just fine:


err: Could not retrieve catalog: Could not connect to puppet.example.com on port 8140