phenix-online.org web server issues on Friday?
Howdy PHENIXians, One of my users reported a "Error attempting to get current version list: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error" on Friday morning last week. Looking through the source, I see: phenix/phenix/utilities/check_version.py which seems to do a version lookup against: http://www.phenix-online.org/download/get_versions.cgi It would be good to set an explicit timeout on the urlopen so the GUI doesn't hang on network errors, web server blow ups, etc. AFAICT, urllib2 uses the default global timeout for the socket module, but socket has no default timeout, so calls to a broken web server can hang your python program. -ben -- | Ben Eisenbraun | Software Sysadmin | | Structural Biology Grid | http://sbgrid.org | | Harvard Medical School | http://hms.harvard.edu |
On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 9:20 AM, Ben Eisenbraun
One of my users reported a "Error attempting to get current version list: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error" on Friday morning last week.
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? It would be good to set an explicit timeout on the urlopen so the GUI
doesn't hang on network errors, web server blow ups, etc.
AFAICT, urllib2 uses the default global timeout for the socket module, but socket has no default timeout, so calls to a broken web server can hang your python program.
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. -Nat
Hi Nat,
Just to clarify, did anything actually break, or did it just print out that error message and continue?
The report was that it hung for some number of minutes and then the GUI finally appeared.
I hadn't thought about SBgrid when I added this - would it be helpful if I added an administrator feature to disable this sitewide?
That could be useful. I do know that we have a few sites with draconian IT policies that prohibit all outbound HTTP that isn't run through their authenticated proxy server (yuck), so having an explicit timeout for networks with fascist admins would still be a good thing. Thanks. -ben -- | Ben Eisenbraun | Software Sysadmin | | Structural Biology Grid | http://sbgrid.org | | Harvard Medical School | http://hms.harvard.edu |
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Ben Eisenbraun -
Nathaniel Echols