[Web-SIG] httplib.HTTPConnection and Broken Pipe

[Sidnei da Silva]

Subclass HTTPConnection and implement your own send()?

On 4/25/07, Bart Whiteley <bwhiteley at novell.com> wrote:
> I have an issue with the following code in
> httplib.HTTPConnection.send():
>
>         # send the data to the server. if we get a broken pipe,
>         # then close the socket. we want to reconnect when
>         # somebody tries to send again.
>         #
>         # NOTE: we DO propagate the error, though, because we
>         #     cannot simply ignore the error... the caller will
>         #     know if they can retry.
>         if self.debuglevel > 0:
>             print "send:", repr(str)
>         try:
>             self.sock.sendall(str)
>         except socket.error, v:
>             if v[0] == 32:      # Broken pipe
>                 self.close()
>             raise
>
> I'm sending a POST request, with a somewhat large (3K) request body.
> The server requires authentication.  If the request doesn't have the
> proper credentials, the server immediately sends a 401 response with an
> authentication challenge, and closes the connection without reading the
> request body.  The server does this to protect against DoS attacks.
> When the client continues sending after the server closes the socket,
> the server sends a TCP reset, and the client usually gets a socket error
> of 104 (connection reset), but sometimes gets an error of 32 (broken
> pipe) instead.  When I get a 104, I'm able to call getresponse(), and
> read the 401 response.  Then I can retry the request with an appropriate
> response to the authentication challenge.  When I get a socket error of
> 32, getresponse() throws an exception, so I don't have an authentication
> challenge to respond to.
>
> If I remove the "try:... except:" code above, so that self.close() does
> not get called on a broken pipe error, the http client code works
> nicely.  In spite of the broken pipe, I can retrieve the response, and
> can retry the request with an appropriate authentication header.
>
> Is anyone aware of a way to work around this problem?
>
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-- 
Sidnei da Silva
Enfold Systems                http://enfoldsystems.com
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