[phenixbb] phenix-online.org web server issues on Friday?

[Ben Eisenbraun]

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 |