urllib error on urlopen

[Michael Palmer]

On Sep 24, 11:46 am, Mike Driscoll <kyoso... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been using the following code for over a year in one of my
> programs:
>
> f = urllib2.urlopen('https://www.companywebsite.com/somestring')
>
> It worked great until the middle of the afternoon yesterday. Now I get
> the following traceback:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<pyshell#13>", line 1, in <module>
>     response = urllib2.urlopen(req).read().strip()
>   File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen
>     return _opener.open(url, data)
>   File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 381, in open
>     response = self._open(req, data)
>   File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 399, in _open
>     '_open', req)
>   File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 360, in _call_chain
>     result = func(*args)
>   File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 1115, in https_open
>     return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPSConnection, req)
>   File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 1082, in do_open
>     raise URLError(err)
> URLError: <urlopen error (1, 'error:140770FC:SSL
> routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol')>
>
> I tried my Google Fu on this error, but there's not much out there. I
> tried using a proxy in Python, but that returned the same traceback.
> If I copy the URL into my browser, it resolves correctly. Does anyone
> have any advice on how to troubleshoot this error?
>
> I am using Python 2.5.2 on Windows XP.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mike

Could it just be a misconfiguration at the other end? Can you open
other https urls?