On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 9:20 AM, Ben Eisenbraun <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bene@hkl.hms.harvard.edu">bene@hkl.hms.harvard.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
One of my users reported a "Error attempting to get current version list:<br>
HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error" on Friday morning last week.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Just to clarify, did anything actually break, or did it just print out that error message and continue? �In theory, the latter is what is supposed to happen (and did when I tested it just now); even if our server is on fire, the GUI should still launch. �(I have no idea what was wrong on Friday, but it might have been me changing something in the code.) �People who find it the version check obnoxious are welcome to turn it off (Preferences->General->Disable check for new versions on startup). �I hadn't thought about SBgrid when I added this - would it be helpful if I added an administrator feature to disable this sitewide?</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">It would be good to set an explicit timeout on the urlopen so the GUI<br>
doesn't hang on network errors, web server blow ups, etc.<br>
<br>
AFAICT, urllib2 uses the default global timeout for the socket module, but<br>
socket has no default timeout, so calls to a broken web server can hang<br>
your python program.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Point taken - I'll add this now. �For what it's worth, I was careful enough to make sure that the version check failed cleanly when the local system was completely offline, but I don't know what the effects of other network issues would be.</div>
<div><br></div><div>-Nat</div></div>