Turning on the debugging option on your Puppet master isn't such a big deal with a few hundred nodes. However, in an environment with thousands of nodes, it isn't a viable option. Nevertheless, you sometimes need to enable debugging to figure out where catalog compilation is failing. Our proxy configuration comes to the rescue here. The idea is to have a worker dedicated to debugging. The debugging server will have debugging turned on, using the --debug and --logdest options in the config.ru file. The advantage of this method over that of running puppet master --compile as we showed earlier, is that while you are debugging your node, you place it in a debugging environment (problem for instance). While the node is in the debugging environment, it will be removed from your reporting infrastructure and not continue to alert you of failures.

To do this, we go back to our proxy.conf file on our Puppet master and define a new balancer named puppetproblem that goes to our debugging worker...