If you have an internal Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server, using the IRC report plugin can be useful. This report sends failed catalog compilations to an IRC chatroom. You can have this plugin installed on all your catalog workers; each catalog worker will login to the IRC server and send failed reports. That works very well, but in this example we'll configure a new worker called reports.example.com. It will be configured as though it were a standalone worker; the reports machine will need the same packages as a regular worker (puppet, httpd, and mod_passenger). We'll enable the IRC logging mechanism on this server. That way we only have to install the dependencies for the IRC reporter on one worker.

The reports server will need certificates signed by puppet.example.com. There are two ways you can have the keys created; the simplest way is to make your reports server a client node of puppet.example.com and have Puppet generate the keys. We will show how to use puppet certificate generate...