[Web-SIG] httplib.HTTPConnection and Broken Pipe

[Bart Whiteley]

On Wed, 2007-04-25 at 23:30 -0300, Sidnei da Silva wrote:
> Subclass HTTPConnection and implement your own send()?

Yes.  That seemed to be the best (or only) solution.  I believe anyone
using HTTPConnection for a POST where authentication may be required
will have to do the same thing. 

> 
> 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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> 
>