ok I had the patch #2661 now running for some weeks and I had nearly no problems anymore. However from time to time (maybe once,twice a week) a random client doesn’t remove its lockfile (@/var/lib/puppet/state/puppetdlock@), hence future runs fail. I assume this might still happen due to a uncatched exception (as in #2261), however the problem is a) hard or nearly impossible to reproduce and b) it occurs really by random. The only thing I can see in the logs:

Nov 30 19:27:41 foobar puppetd[26228]: Finished catalog run in 98.79 seconds
Nov 30 20:00:02 foobar puppetd[3000]: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 502 on SERVER: ^M ^M ^M 
502 Bad Gateway^M 
nginx/0.6.39^M ^M ^M
Nov 30 20:00:03 foobar puppetd[3000]: Using cached catalog
Nov 30 20:00:03 foobar puppetd[3000]: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run
Nov 30 20:00:04 foobar puppetd[12169]: Run of Puppet configuration client already in progress; skipping
Nov 30 20:30:04 foobar puppetd[21230]: Run of Puppet configuration client already in progress; skipping

as I run puppetd by cron twice an hour with —splay I assume that the run between 19:30 and 20:00 got delayed till 20:00. At this time (20:00) a puppetmaster restart happens and due to that the 502 occured. This was the run of pid 3000, the next run (pid 12169) failed, this could either be as pid 3000 was still running or because there was already no puppetd anymore running and the lock file haven’t been removed. However every future run failed as well as the lockfile wasn’t removed.

So somehow puppet doesn’t remove lockfiles properly under certain conditions.

PS: If you think it’s better to reopen the old bugreport, close this one and duplicate and re-open #2261