There's enough trouble with puppet's ssl model (mandatory client certs) that people go and do odd things to get around it. The primary problem is that for lab/preproduction environments, if you reinstall machines frequently, you lose access to the private key that generated the original cert but (absent some puppet cert --clean [node] operation) the cert still exists, leading to the dreaded Retrieved certificate doesn't match private key error.
Generate a single client certificate which all your nodes use, and have the master determine node names from facter rather than the SSL DN. This way you can re-install nodes with impunity and as long as your bootstrap plops down the correct config and the cert+key, you don't have any more SSL issues.
If you have autosign turned on, this change represents a shift in security tradeoffs: you can turn off autosign and therefore more tightly control which clients can talk to your server because they need to have your clie