Puppet uses VCR and WebMock to stub/expect network connections. If a network request is made that wasn't expected, then VCR intercepts the request and prints a not useful error message. You can allow VCR to pass through requests it doesn't care about (using vcr.allow_http_connections_when_no_cassette = true) but that interferes with we are using ancient versions of webmock and vcr.
This ticket is to rewrite the file http content/metadata tests to no longer use update vcr and webmock, and remove the ensure vcr runtime gem dependency (from the Gemfile) and only generates errors on tests that have explicitly been tagged with {{spec/spec_helper.rb:vcr}} using rspec metadata.